From the time man-midwives began giving obstetric lectures in the eighteenth century, proponents trumpeted the triumphs of the profession: forceps, fillets, education, masculine ingenuity, and emotional detachment. Two opposing stories explaining obstetricians’ triumphs have dominated historical literature. Yet, even if we are right to grasp the story as both interesting in itself and standing for much larger shifts in gender relationships, the mechanics of the tale- how men conquered the midwives-seem much more elusive. 1 Documents such as the learned, lengthy, and frequently sarcastic defense by midwife Elizabeth Nihell reveal how much midwives did know about reproductive anatomy and care at the time moreover, her observations, such as that “many women have found, by severe experience, their having been enemies to themselves, in abandoning or slighting those of their own sex” also reveal women’s ability to construct an argument based on gender and attempt to create female bonds. For instance, Louis LaPeyre’s 1772 snipe, “a midwife is an animal with nothing of the woman left,” not only reveals how a once important female occupation was dismissed as uncivilized, but also captures the contemporary vitriol used to check female spheres of influence and denigrate powerful women more generally. Why do we tell this story so often? Surely for many feminists, the story serves as a most dramatic example of and also an allegory for the broader, complex shifts in the family, demographics, and professions that occurred in the eighteenth century. Yet for at least thirty years, there seems to be no stopping historians of medicine and gender (myself included) from returning to this well-known tale of male doctors somehow triumphing over midwives. Why retell, yet again, how the British man-midwife displaced the traditional female practitioner during the eighteenth century? Haven’t medical and feminist historians laid bare all the relevant evidence and problems here? After all, many sources-especially the major obstetric texts, the handful of midwifery texts written by women, and such novels as Tristram Shandy-have been closely examined and have generated scores of scholarly articles and books.
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