Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Book Description
Eighteenth-century British Midwifery: The Mary Toft affair
The Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder
Author: Karen HarveyPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198734883
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
In October 1726, newspapers began reporting a remarkable event. In the town of Godalming in Surrey, a woman called Mary Toft had started to give birth to rabbits. Several leading doctors - some sent directly by King George I - travelled to examine the woman and she was moved to London to be closer to them. By December, she had been accused of fraud and taken into custody. Mary Toft's unusual deliveries caused a media sensation. Her rabbit births were a test case for doctors trying to further their knowledge about the processes of reproduction and pregnancy. The rabbit births prompted not just public curiosity and scientific investigation, but also a vicious backlash. Based on extensive new archival research, this book is the first in-depth re-telling of this extraordinary story. Karen Harvey situates the rabbit-births within the troubled community of Godalming and the women who remained close to Mary Toft as the case unfolded, exploring the motivations of the medics who examined her, considering why the case attracted the attention of the King and powerful men in government, and following the case through the criminal justice system. The case of Mary Toft exposes huge social and cultural changes in English history. Against the backdrop of an incendiary political culture, it was a time when traditional social hierarchies were shaken, relationships between men and women were redrawn, print culture acquired a new vibrancy and irreverence, and knowledge of the body was remade. But Mary Toft's story is not just a story about the past. In reconstructing Mary's physical, social and mental world, The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder allows us to reflect critically on our own ideas about pregnancy, reproduction, and the body through the lens of the past.
The Making of Man-Midwifery
Author: Adrian WilsonPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429663358
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
Originally published 1995 The Making of Man-Midwifery looks at how the eighteenth century witnessed a revolution in childbirth practices. By the last quarter of the century increasing numbers of babies were being delivered by men – a dramatic shift from the women-only ritual that had been standard throughout Western history. This authoritative and challenging work explains this transformation in medical practice and remarkable shift in gender relations. By tracing the actual development and transmission of the new midwifery skills through the period, the book addresses both technological and feminist arguments of the period. The study is distinctive in treating childbirth as both a bodily and a social event and in explaining how the two were intimately connected. Practical obstetrics is shown to have been shaped by the social relations surrounding deliveries, and specific techniques were associated with distinctive places and political allegiances. The books studies how increasing numbers emergent male-midwives had overtaken women in the skill of delivering children and how as such expectant mothers chose to use these male-midwives, thus heralding the growth of male-midwives in the period.
Eighteenth-century British Midwifery
Author: Pam LieskePublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781851968435
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Scholars of the British Enlightenment who study obstetrical history traditionally focus on the rise of the male-midwife and competition between the sexes. This set comprises pamphlets, treatises, lectures for midwifery students, texts on the establishment of lying-in hospitals, and catalogues of obstetrical apparatuses collected by male-midwives.
Eighteenth-century British Midwifery
Author: Pam LieskePublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781851968435
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
Scholars of the British Enlightenment who study obstetrical history traditionally focus on the rise of the male-midwife and competition between the sexes. This set comprises pamphlets, treatises, lectures for midwifery students, texts on the establishment of lying-in hospitals, and catalogues of obstetrical apparatuses collected by male-midwives.
The Common Touch
Author: Adrian RoscoePublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144389348X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460
Book Description
Beginning where volume one of The Common Touch leaves off, selections of English popular literature from the Restoration to the mid-years of the eighteenth century are offered in this second and final volume. However, while interest in such traditional literary types as the ballad and chapbook continued unabated in this period, new forms began to emerge, with the popularity of journals and novels reflecting not only a more diversified readership, but also the rise of prose as a medium for public debate and entertainment. With increasing middle-class literacy filtering down to servants and apprentices, moreover, the voices of the destitute and the social outcast could be increasingly heard, marking a shift from high-born to low-born, from town to country and from men to women (and children) – culminating in the Romantic movement at the end of the century.
Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie
Author: Robert WoodsPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781381410
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 560
Book Description
A remarkable history of midwifery in the eighteenth century.
Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
Author: Dexter PalmerPublisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525432736
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
In 1726, in the town of Godalming, England, a woman confounded the nation’s medical community by giving birth to seventeen rabbits. This astonishing true story is the basis for Dexter Palmer’s stunning, powerfully evocative new novel. Surgeon’s apprentice Zachary Walsh knows that his master, John Howard, prides himself on his rationality. But John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John and Zachary realize that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared them to deal with a situation like this—strange, troubling, and possibly miraculous. John contacts several of London’s finest surgeons, three of whom soon arrive in Godalming to observe, argue, and perhaps use the case to cultivate their own fame. When King George I learns of Mary’s plight, she and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences a world far removed from his small-town existence and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. All the while Mary lies in bed, as doubts begin to blossom among her caretakers and a growing group of onlookers waits with impatience for another birth, another miracle.
Dr. William Smellie and His Contemporaries
Author: John GlaisterFemale Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750
Author: Naomi PullinPublisher: Cambridge Studies in Early Mod
ISBN: 1316510239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319
Book Description
This original interpretation of the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750 highlights the unique ways in which adherence to the movement shaped women's lives, as well as the ways in which female Friends transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious and political culture.