Man-midwifery exposed, or the danger and immorality of employing men in midwifery proved and the remedy for the evil found : addressed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. / By John Stevens.

  • Stevens, John, -approximately 1849.
Date:
[1866]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man-midwifery exposed, or the danger and immorality of employing men in midwifery proved and the remedy for the evil found : addressed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. / By John Stevens. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    Royal MaternUy Charity, for delivering poor Married Women at their own Habitations, Statistical Retuen for the Ybar 1855. Deli vs. Males, Fomls. Twins. Still-boiu. Deaths. Med. Oases. Eastern division Western do. Southern do. 1927 744 310 969 368 174 977 381 142 19 5 6 60 18 8 Mo. 7 0 3 Ch. 27 3 6 93 24 15 2981 1611 1600 30 86 10 36 132 * The medical cases are those to which the midwife called in the aid of a medical man. It will be seen that out of 2,981 deliveries, 86 alone produced still-born children, 132 being the total of medical cases, whilst 10 women only out of that large number died, three of whom were from non-puerperal cases, leaving therefore only seven deaths from causes connected with childbirth. These patients, it must be borne in mind, are chiefly among the very poor, who not ujifre- quently suffer the greatest privations, consequently are impaired in strength and vigour of constitution, and we might naturally ex- pect even greater mortality then in the higher grades of society. This is not an isolated case in connection with this Institution, for year after year similar results are shewn; and in 1851 the foUow- ingremarksoftheMedical Committee of the Charity were printed— They (the Medical Committee) find that the total deliveries, from the first formation of the Charity to the close of 1850, amount to the enormous number of 371,880 ; that those in the year 1850 were 2,864, in which large number only nine deaths occurred within the month after delivery, being in the proportion of one in every 316 cases attended. Of these nine women, however, several sunk imder the efiects of previous organic disease; thus, out of the nine deaths six were the result of confirmed phthisis (consumption) or of some other pulmonary afiection, which diseases, it is well known, exert a most rapidly fatal influence shortly after labor. One woman died of suspected diseased heart a few hours after delivery. Such cases ought, therefore, to be removed from the list of puerperal casuaUties, and the average of truly puer- peral deaths would then be reduced below one in 140O cases ! '* Your Medical Committee consider that no medical charity in this great city is calculated to avert a larger amoimt of evil, or to dispense more positive good among the poorer classes, at the same small expenditure of money, than the one over whose management you (the General Committee) preside, and they feel persuaded that the more constantly it is kept before the public eye the more will it be found to deserve the public patronage. Many arguments, as well of a social as moral character, might be adduced to establish the superiority of such a Charity as this, where the women are delivered at their own homes, over the same kind of assistance rendered at a hospital; but such would be foreign to the objects of your Medical Committee. They cannot, however, pass over the small average of puerperal deaths, which it is their peculiar province to notice, without contrasting them with the results furnished by the reports of the different lying-in hospitals, both in this country and on the Continent. In most of these establishments, from causes