Male Midwives Research Articles

Oefening en bespiegeling: het verloskunde onderwijs van M. S. du Pui (1754-1834) te Leiden (review)

Reviewed by: Oefening en bespiegeling: Het verloskunde onderwijs van M. S. du Pui (1754–1834) te Leiden Harold J. Cook M. M. Lamens-van Malenstein. Oefening en bespiegeling: Het verloskunde onderwijs van M. S. du Pui (1754–1834) te Leiden. Pantaleon Reeks, no. 26. Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1997. 477 pp. Ill. Hfl. 97.50. A thorough study of the life and teachings of Meinard Simon du Pui, Lamens-van Malenstein’s book will be of interest to those who wish to learn more about the [End Page 331] development of university instruction in obstetrics at the turn of the nineteenth century. After beginning his medical studies at Groningen and Leiden, du Pui traveled to London and Paris for further work; returned to take his M.D. at Leiden in 1780; obtained the post of lecturer in anatomy, surgery, and obstetrics at the city of Kampen and then Alkmaar; and in 1791 finally returned to Leiden as a professor extraordinarius in surgery and obstetrics (gaining the post of professor in 1795). He established a university clinic in 1799 to add formal teaching in the practice of childbirth and surgery to his lecturing, while he also supervised his students as they gained additional experience by helping poor women during childbirth at home. Du Pui’s teachings on obstetrics, which took account of the best recent work in England, France, and Germany, became the most respected in the Netherlands, and several of his students went on to gain academic posts at other universities, where they passed on his views and methods. Lamens-van Malenstein conveys all this topically. After a brief but thorough biography of du Pui, he examines contemporary surgical and obstetrical teachings in England, France, and Germany; investigates du Pui’s library; discusses the municipal ordinances and institutions governing midwifery in Leiden; presents the views on practice and theory advocated by du Pui; and accounts for his students. A summary in English of several pages concludes the book, making a sketch of the author’s discussion available to those who do not read Dutch. Appendices also make many of du Pui’s works (originally in Latin) available in a facing-page translation into Dutch. Du Pui was an interesting as well as influential instructor. He gave special importance to a thorough study of the pelvis, since deformations of it were so often the reason for calling in a surgeon or male midwife. He taught the cautious use of forceps and levers, following English practice, and in cases where the life of the baby or the mother had to be sacrificed, he believed in using methods for saving the life of the mother (although he did convey to his students the procedures for cesarean section, almost always fatal to the mother). Du Pui also taught symphysiotomy (splitting open the pubic cartilage), which was used in his day as a way of trying to increase the pelvic opening, as an alternative to the use of the hook or the knife on the child; but he taught that the use of this method was indicated only in exceptional cases, and he himself never used it. He also advocated patience in waiting for the afterbirth to be ejected by nature, rather than pulling it out quickly after the child emerged. These and other teachings of du Pui illustrate the growing influence of the “expectant” orientation of medicine at the turn of the century, in which the physician preferred to wait for nature to take its course, helping as needed. Lamens-van Malenstein does not question whether this basic orientation of du Pui’s was representative or unusual, or whether it reflected an attitude that had more general effects on medical practice or was confined to obstetrics. The book is therefore not as significant a contribution to the general study of medicine in the period as it might have been. But it will be of much value to anyone who [End Page 332] wishes to compare the important obstetrical teachings of this Leiden professor with those in other parts of northwestern Europe at the same time. Harold J. Cook University of Wisconsin-Madison Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex

Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex Mary Loeffelholz (bio) In 1837, twelve years after her subject’s death at age seventeen from tuberculosis, popular novelist Catherine Sedgwick contributed a long biographical sketch of the poet Lucretia Maria Davidson to Jared Sparks’ Library of American Biography. Sedgwick’s biographical essay consolidated the reputation Lucretia Davidson had earlier won with her small posthumous collection, Amir Khan and Other Poems, assembled at the instigation of Lucretia’s mother Margaret, edited by academician Samuel B. Morse, and published in 1829. Thus sponsored chiefly by women, Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous career as a poet had also, as Cheryl Walker has put it, a number of contemporary “male midwives,” 1 Washington Irving and Robert Southey conspicuously among them. A few years later, Mrs. Margaret Miller Davidson would draw on similar forms of authorization—this time with Washington Irving supplying Sedgwick’s place as introductory biographer—in assembling and publishing the Poetical Remains of still another daughter, Margaret Miller Davidson, who also died of tuberculosis in her teens. The combined Remains of both sisters, together with Sedgwick’s and Irving’s biographies, were issued in a handsome new two-volume companion edition in 1841. Lucretia Davidson’s Remains sold well enough to circulate for several decades, in translations as well as in new American editions. 2 In 1843, finally, Mrs. Davidson completed the family portrait when she “appear[ed] for the first time before the public” in her own person, with Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Davidson, introduced again by Miss Sedgwick, who justified Mrs. Davidson’s discarding “the diffidence natural to a recluse and delicate woman” by referring to those readers “who have expressed a curiosity to know more of the mind whose holiest and brightest emanations were infused into those rare sisters, who seem hardly to have touched our world on their passage to Heaven.” 3 The combined 1841 Remains attracted the notice of Edgar Allen Poe, who damned them with faint praise and used them as a stick with which to beat on the Davidsons’ promoters. 4 Even Poe’s ambivalent notice, however, had to concede that those promoters had been effective; indeed, that is half his grievance as well as half his fascination with the Davidson sisters. By the time Poe [End Page 271] reviewed the composite Remains in 1841, he was well and ironically aware that “Lucretia Davidson” was a family enterprise, a cottage industry, a fulminating discursive formation, as well as the proper name of a dead girl. If, in his famous dictum, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” what seems to have intrigued Poe in the Davidson sisters—young, white, upper-middle-class, consumptive, dead, thus by convention beautiful, and “poetical” both as subjects and objects—was at least in part the cultural machinery brought to the making of this “poetical.” His review of Margaret Miller Davidson’s Remains opens with an account of her elder sister’s making as a poet: “The name of Lucretia Davidson is familiar to all readers of Poetry. Dying at the early age of seventeen, she has been rendered famous not less, and certainly not more, by her own precocious genius than by three memorable biographies,” those of Morse, Sedgwick, and Southey. The name and death of Lucretia authorize the appearance of her sister Margaret Miller, whose name and remains in their turn implicate yet another woman, the other Margaret Miller Davidson. “Few books,” Poe says of Margaret’s Remains, “have interested us more profoundly”: Yet the interest does not appertain solely to Margaret. ‘In fact, the narrative,’ says Mr. Irving, ‘will be found almost as illustrative of the character of the mother as of the child; they were singularly identified in taste, feeling, and pursuit; tenderly entwined together by maternal and filial affection, they reflected an inexpressibly touching grace and interest upon each other by this holy relationship, and, to my mind, it would be marring one of the most beautiful and affecting groups in modern literature to sunder them.’ In these words the biographer conveys no more than a just idea of the exquisite loveliness of the...

Desire for Position of Male Midwife

Desire for Position of Male Midwife

Acoustic Competition in Male Midwife Toads Alytes obstetricans and Alytes cisternasii: Response to Neighbor Size and Calling Rate. Implications for Female Choice

AbstractEffects of neighbor on male calling behavior was studied through playback experiments of synthetic calls to males of two species of midwife toads. The responses of resident males were scored considering two temporal parameters (call duration and calling rate) and one spectral parameter (dominant frequency). The sounds used for the playback tests included two levels of fundamental frequency (correlated with male size) and two levels of call repetition rate. In both species, resident males only changed their calling rate in the presence of an intruder, and the response was different for synthetic calls with two levels of dominant frequencies and with two calling rates. Resident size was not significantly correlated with the magnitude of the change in the calling rate. On the other hand, resident calling rate was significantly and positively correlated with the magnitude of the increase in calling rate of the stimulus. The maximum relative increase in calling rate was observed in A. cisternasii. In phonotaxis tests, females are preferentially attracted to calls emitted at a higher rate confirming the importance of changes in calling rate for female attraction.

クロサンショウウオの繁殖行動,特に雄の助産行動について

クロサンショウウオの繁殖行動,特に雄の助産行動について

The developments and trends in relaation to men practising midwifery: a review of the literatur

The literature shows that throughout history the duties and responsibilities of the female midwife have been eroded and impinged upon by better-educated and better-equipped male medical men. Although several of these early 'men midwives' greatly improved midwifery practice, they tended to commandeer not only the best methods and the kudos but also the most interesting cases. The midwives of the past failed to stop the growth of obstetrics, and their contemporaries through the intercession of the 1951 Midwifery Act attempted to block entry into the profession by male nurses. Prior to the mid 1970s, it was assumed by the leadership of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) that the introduction of male midwives would be unpopular not only with the expectant mothers but also with their husbands. Subsequent research demonstrated that this was not necessarily the case. Rather it was female midwives themselves who did not welcome the invasion of male practitioners into their domain. A review of the research literature suggests that the fears expressed by the RCM were unfounded and, by the late 1970s through to the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Sex Discrimination Act and several political machinations, male nurses were undertaking midwifery training.

Male Midwives and Medical Workers for the Third World

Male Midwives and Medical Workers for the Third World

Points: Male midwives

Points: Male midwives

Women and Men Midwives By Jane B. Donegan (review)

weeding out unfounded claims and speeding the payment of meritorious ones. Law and Polan reject screening panels as unsatisfactory, judging them to be biased in favor of doctors and unfair to patients. One serious cause of malpractice suits to which the authors give little attention is the "great expectation" which patients bring to doctors. Patients who observe a profession that has produced antibiotics and open-heart surgery cannot comprehend the failure of a physician to make them better than new. With this attitude, they cannot conceive that bad results can obtain from the best of medical practice. The attitude is further damaging because it negates the essence of informed consent. Patients about to be "etherized upon the table" believe that no matter how conscientiously their doctor may describe possible dangers to them, the dangers happen to someone else. Consent, therefore, is rarely truly informed . And so the claims of malpractice continue apace. Law and Polan have done much to illuminate the problem, but their next opus should strive for more neutrality. Marian F. Ratnoff 100 Public Square Cleveland, Ohio 44113 Women and Men Midwives. By Jane B. Donegan. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1978. Pp. 316. $17.95. Creative teachers and authors are those who inspire the best questions. Richard Shryock was one of these individuals. In his classes and books, he stimulated his audiences to continue the search, to take the next path beyond the one he had followed. One of Shryock's observations—that Anglo-Saxon women abandoned female midwives for male physicians in an age of prudery—led Jane Donegan to write the book, Women and Men Midwives; Medicine, Morality, and Misogyny in Early America. Donegan examines "the development of maledominated obstetrics against the background of middle-class concepts of morality , reform movements, and emerging feminism." She reviews English and American documents between 1750 and 1860 concerning the proper attendant for childbirth, and includes selections from professional literature, popular health publications, feminist writings, and the mass of articles in periodicals by the general lay public. Such a wide scope of literary sources emphasizes the intensity of the problem to all sectors of society and clearly indicates the need for such a study. In the first chapters, the author reviews the traditional role of women as midwives and the gradual shift toward pregnant women accepting and then seeking men as attendants in delivery. The book deals primarily with midwives in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York; however, Donegan includes some background from England. While much of her material from the 1700s is derived from secondary sources (not all of which are trustworthy), she gives a lively picture of some of the most important figures in the eighteenth century, including William Smelile and William Hunter. She describes their role in developing the "new obstetrics," which stressed academic expertise. Although she mentions a few personalities from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French obstetrical 314 Book Reviews history, the author does not adequately discuss the significance of the differences in the way women retained their role in midwifery in France as compared to England and the United States. Donegan suggests that the evolution from female to male midwives was "brought about by the technology developed by an emerging medical profession ." Thus, she emphasizes the use of instruments and improved anatomical studies as the means by which men gained entrance to the birthroom. Yet she mentions as a minor item (in a footnote) male physicians' use of anesthetics in the mid-nineteenth century, when they probably played as much or more important a part than any other technological development in encouraging women to seek male physicians for routine deliveries. While technology was only part of the motivation for women to choose male birth attendants, it was the most visible feature of their prowess. Certainly it influenced Queen Victoria when she chose John Snow to administer ether for her eighth delivery in 1853, and it probably played a part in Queen Charlotte's shift from Mrs. Draper to William Hunter as her attendant with her fourth delivery in 1766. In her review of the mid-nineteenth-century literature, Donegan brings out the rivalries between trained and untrained attendants, "heroic" and conservative male physicians, regular...

Important aspects of midwifery.

The art of midwifery must be one of the oldest of acquired skills. In prehistoric times, the more experienced women assisted and comforted their younger relatives during parturition. There are scattered references to midwives in ancient literature, including the Bible. In Genesis 35:17 we learn that Rachel’s death was the result of “ hard labour” . One should congratulate the midwife who delivered Sarah of a son at the age of 90 years - Genesis 17:17. Midwifery stagnated during the Middle Ages due, partly to the ignorance of the midwives as well as to a lack of knowledge of human anatomy coupled with the accepted teaching of the ancients, which was regarded as the ultimate authority. Great advances in the art and science of midwifery have occurred since the Middle Ages, amounting to a revolution in thought and practice. Less than 100 years ago, in 1898, in W.S. Playfair’s “Science and Practice of Midwifery” no mention was made of any form of antenatal examination or even of the testing of urine for albumin. Times have indeed changed - today the whole concept of maternal and child care would be quite unrecognisable to a Victorian midwife. We have also accepted the male midwife into our midst.

First Certified Male Midwife Practices in New Haven

First Certified Male Midwife Practices in New Haven

A Salamander Midwife

J. P. A. ANGSEESING1 is mistaken in most of his criticism of Kammerer's experiments as described by Koestler2. Angseesing quite reasonably supposes that the formation of nuptual pads on male midwife toads might involve a genetic mechanism activated by their confinement to aquatic conditions or high temperature. The crux of the argument, however, is the claim that this condition was inherited and intensified in successive generations. Any explanation must therefore involve selection or the inheritance of acquired characteristics, in addition to the probable physiological mechanism.