Abstract
The quotation marks in my title have been carefully placed: I shall be discussing not ‘midwifery in the medical marketplace’ but rather the way in which a model of the medical marketplace has been applied to midwifery in early eighteenth-century England. Specifically, it has been suggested that the rise of man-midwifery — that remarkable new form of medical practice in which the medical man came, by around 1750, to play the role of midwife — can be attributed to competition between medical men for a limited pool of patients. This model has been applied in three somewhat different ways, which nevertheless all invoke the ‘medical marketplace’ as an arena of competition, and see such competition as the universal currency of relationships between early modern practitioners. These claims are interesting in allocating to the ‘medical marketplace’ a dynamic role, as an agent of change; but I shall suggest that this particular application of the concept is not persuasive. After developing this argument, I shall go on to suggest some points of wider application, whose common burden is that the concept of the medical marketplace needs to be sharpened and refined.
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Notes
I. Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1986), 90 and passim.
I. Loudon, ‘Childbirth’, in I. Loudon ed., Western Medicine (Oxford, 1996), 211.
D. Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2000), 176.
P. J. Wallis, R. V. Wallis, J. G. L. Burnby and T. D. Whittet, Eighteenth Century Medics, 2nd edn (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1988).
J. Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (1996), 4.
N. J. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in C. Dale ed., Wiltshire Apprentices and Their Masters 1710–1760, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Records Branch (Devizes, 1961), viii.
A similar pattern has been observed in ecclesiastical licensing: see D. Harley, ‘Provincial Midwives in England: Lancashire and Cheshire, 1660–1760’, in H. Marland ed., The Art of Midwifery (1993), 39–40. For the general case, see A. Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery (1995), passim.
I know of no study of the development of provincial lying-in charities; so far as I am aware, the first was at Newcastle in 1760. On London philanthropy in general, see D. T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police (Princeton, 1989).
D. Cressy, ‘Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England’, P&P, 141 (1993); U. Rublack, ‘Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in the Early Modern Germany’, P&P, 150 (1996); L. Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, P&P, 156 (1997); L. Pollock, ‘Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England’, Social History, 22 (1997); A. Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation’, in V. Fildes ed., Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990).
Percival Willughby, Observations in Midwifery (Wakefield, 1972 [1863]), 206.
E.g., M. Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, 30 (1996); A. Vickery, ‘Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751–81’, in J. Brewer & R. Porter eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (1993);
R. Sweet & P. Lane eds, Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 2003).
See R. Porter ‘Introduction’, in R. Porter ed., Patients and Practitioners (Cambridge, 1985), 10; cf. the editors’ introduction to the present volume.
Advance calls with midwife; advance calls in lieu of midwife; booked onset calls with midwife; booked emergency calls; and unbooked emergency calls (by far the commonest category). These comprised five of the eight theoretically possible such paths. For these categories and for the distinctions underlying them, see A. Wilson, ‘William Hunter and the Varieties of Man-Midwifery’, in W.F. Bynum and R. Portereds, William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World (Cambridge, 1985).
See A. Wilson, ‘A Memorial of Eleanor Willughby, a Seventeenth-Century Midwife’, in L. Hunter and S. Huttoneds, Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud, 1997).
L. A. Pollock, With Faith and Physic (1995).
On the Royal Touch and on Greatrakes, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 192–8, and M. Bloch, The Royal Touch (1973 [1961]).
A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934).
G. W. Oxley, Poor Relief in England and Wales, 1601–1834 (Newton Abbot, 1974).
K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985).
See D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death (Oxford, 1997).
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Wilson, A. (2007). Midwifery in the ‘Medical Marketplace’. In: Jenner, M.S.R., Wallis, P. (eds) Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591462_8
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