The Care of the Pregnant Woman Through the Ages

Among the causes of the decline of this art, too, was that physicians were forbidden to enter the room of the pregnant woman to study how the fetus emerges. But in the year 1522, before Paré came upon the writings of Soranus, Dr. Wertt in Hamburg, Germany, put on a woman's clothes and went in to watch a woman giving birth, in order to learn how delivery takes place. When the people learned of this they were horrified at his deed, turned on him in anger, and burned him alive, and so he died a martyr of science and humanity. A hundred years after him came Dr. Willughby, who hid in a dark room and watched a woman being delivered by his daughter, the midwife; had the people known of him then, his fate would have been the fate of his colleague Dr. Wertt.

Had society permitted physicians to enter the room of the woman in labor, to assist her and to study how she gave birth, this art would have advanced before the year 1550. It is astonishing that physicians should have been barred from delivering babies in modern times, when the physicians of Greece in ancient times were called in for difficult deliveries and did their duty to science, saving the lives of mothers and children. Even in our own age many people still disdain to call in the physician, in the belief that it is a woman who ought to do the delivering, not a man.

The first signs of the renaissance of women's medicine and of the care of the pregnant woman and her delivery appeared during the seventeenth century, after surgery had advanced a little. From that time this science began to take shape: physicians began to succeed in changing the abnormal position of the fetus, so that the crushing of its skull and its dismemberment grew rarer, and they became able also to bring it out of the womb before term when the mother's pelvis was so narrow that its emergence at term would be difficult.

In the year 1801 "Denman" in England was warning the pregnant woman against eating meats, prescribing for her vegetables and fruit, forbidding her to sip strong purgatives or to take sleeping drugs, and advising her to sip a glass of cold water at bedtime. In this period we find counsels for the pregnant woman in the French books, but nothing new in them; except that "Legley" in the year 1812 recommended that the pregnant woman be given whatever foods she craved during her cravings, that she be treated with gentleness and kindness, that she take exercise without strain, and that her surroundings be cheerful — as Susruta had said in India of old. "Lespière" warned the pregnant woman against listening to frightening tales of the pains of childbirth. Bloodletting was still practiced up to this era, except among the German physicians. Medical knowledge was much the same in most of the kingdoms of Europe.

To the two doctors "Oliver" and "Wendell Holmes" in the year 1843, and to Dr. "Semmelweis" in the year 1847, belongs the honor of discovering the causes of puerperal fever. In the year 1849 "Tyler Smith" advised the pregnant woman to look to the health of her teeth and to care for them thoroughly, to prevent miscarriage. The first to use anesthesia in delivery was Dr. "James Simpson," in the year 1847, and thereby he lightened the pains of childbirth for the pregnant woman. It became apparent to this Dr. James, to Dr. "Lever," and to others in the year 1850 that puerperal convulsions, "eclampsia," are accompanied by albumin in the urine; from that time we have had some knowledge of this dangerous type of convulsions.

The art of women's medicine began to appear as possessed of a settled scientific remedy, and many medical schools were founded in the nineteenth century in America and Europe. Dr. "Dewees" began delivering lectures on the art of obstetrics in Philadelphia, and Dr. "Worcester" in Pennsylvania; Dr. "Thomas James" was appointed for the first time professor of obstetrics and of the diseases of women and children at the University of Pennsylvania, and specialized professors of this art appeared.

For the first time in the history of this modern art, Dr. "James White," in the city of Buffalo, on January 18, 1850, delivered an Irish woman before the graduating students of the medical school. This act of his aroused sharp criticism; the public was indignant at him, American society split between approvers and condemners, and fears arose then for public morals — so much so that Dr. White brought suit in the courts against a colleague who had harassed and insulted him. Dr. "Abraham Pratt" criticized Dr. White at the time, saying that the exposure of the genital organs and the viewing of them during delivery was indecency and an insult to medicine, that a woman must not give birth before anyone, and that if the physician is called he must touch without seeing... The debates and wrangles over this subject grew so heated that the American Medical Association was compelled to appoint a special committee to decide whether delivery before an audience was a danger to public morals or not.