THE ART OF MIDWIFERY doc

[...]... licences from the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, not only drew their clientele from a more influential and affluent sector of society, but that this elevated group continued to use the services of the midwife If the occupational designations for 1663 and the 1690s from the records of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury... five weeks apart, one of whom lived in the Minories and the other at a considerable distance to the west in the Strand The existence of other networks between women and their clients can be traced in the testimonials Mary DesOrmeaux, wife of Daniel, a jeweller of St Giles in the Fields, was a member of the French church in the Savoy (home of the Huguenot congregation) when she applied for a midwifery. .. the West, and Mary Searle, the wife of a St Sepulchre barber-surgeon.43 Frances Sowden of St Martin Outwich obtained sworn testimony from Alice Lovell, the wife of another St Sepulchre barber-surgeon, in the same year As late as 1698, there is evidence in the testimonials that the wives of surgeons continued to rely on the traditional skills of a competent midwife rather than those of the surgeon The. .. assured by the end of the eighteenth century (Chapter 10) Midwives themselves were concerned with issues other than the challenge of male obstetric practice—and they were not afraid to complain about their salaries and status, their duties in the community, questions of citizenship, the poor quality of training, problems between midwives and their apprentices, or annoyance about the incursions of ‘quack’... indication of the continuing loyalty of gentry women to their midwives can be found in testimonial evidence at the end of the century Of seventy-five testimonials presented to the vicar general for the City of London in the years 1690–1700, sixty-five contain occupational and status designations Of 198 possible designations, fourteen husbands were listed as members of the gentry MOTHERS AND THEIR MIDWIVES... That is, out of a total of 676 deliveries, 64 per cent involved a client who had used the midwife on more than one occasion The midwife delivered eight sets of twins (counted as one delivery), and in all but one of these cases the mothers were delivered of other children by Mistress X At least twenty-two of the clients who used the midwife’s services only once did so in the last five years of her recorded... practice: in the years covered by her records the busy and popular midwife travelled far beyond the confines of the City To the east, she journeyed to Leytonstone, Spitalfields and Whitechapel where she attended, among others, Mrs Dangerfield in her numerous confinements; to the north, to the area of Finsbury Fields and the northern reaches of the vast ward of Cripplegate Without; to the west, she... in the exclusive goldsmith trade Similarly, among the seven clients sworn for Elizabeth Ayre of St Giles Cripplegate in 1664, Lucy Buffington was the wife of goldsmith John Buffington of the midwife’s parish, and Elizabeth Swift was the wife of Abraham Swift, a goldsmith of St Alban Wood Street; three of the remaining clients attesting to Ayre’s expertise were the wives of brewers.24 In the case of. .. women of considerable social and economic standing practised midwifery, although there was great variation in both directions David Harley outlines the wide range of social backgrounds of midwives working in Lancashire and Cheshire in the second half of the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth—from the prosperous to the very poor who were paid for their midwifery work in lieu of poor... by the last quarter of the eighteenth century—did not herald the immediate decline of the midwife (Chapter 5) In France, the sending out of Mme du Coudray in 1759 on her mission to re-educate the midwives of France was hardly symptomatic of a decline in the midwife’s role as normal childbirth attendant; it was Mme du Coudray’s niece, representing the next generation of midwives working towards the . x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" THE ART OF MIDWIFERY THE WELLCOME INSTITUTE SERIES IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE Edited by W.F.Bynum and Roy Porter The Wellcome Institute Florence. research concerns the history of women, in particular women’s work and the history of childbearing. A founder member of the Italian Society of Women Historians