1748-1751

In England “. . . there emerged a man-midwifery of a very different kind: booked onset calls (and among the very wealthy advance calls) in lieu of a midwife. . . . During the next two decades it became clear that this was a permanent and irreversible shift: the midwife’s hegemony had been decisively fractured” (A. Wilson, 164). This new man-midwifery arose from the choices of women . . . whereas the lying-in hospitals were created by men” (165). This led to critiques of the social role of the man-midwife, beginning with campaign of Frank Nicholls in 1751-52, according to whom the male midwife violated “modesty” and transposed methods appropriate for difficult births to the realm of normal deliveries (166-167).