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criticisms of practicing midwives
—
believed that the
female midwife, not a male practitioner such as
himself, was the proper person to manage childbirth.
This ingrained assumption on Willughby’s part
reflected the conceptual horizon imposed by the fact
that the male practitioner’s task was to deliver a dead
child, not a living baby. (1997: 167)
27
This observation might come from his experiences while
working with his daughter, Eleanor Willughby, who became a
midwife at the age of fifteen or sixteen, possibly at her father’s
request. In
Observation
, a case history of a dangerous
childbirth, it was presumably the (unidentified) daughter-
midwife who successfully completed the delivery under adverse
conditions. According to Willughby’s account, a pregnant
woman designated as “Sir Tennebs Evanks lady”
28
was
diagnosed by Eleanor, only nineteen or twenty at the time, as
having a fetus in the breech position but her father disagreed;
later Eleanor’s diagnosis proved to be correct, and she
delivered the baby safely. Moreover, her father had to creep in
and out of the room on his hands and knees so that the mother
would not see him: this deception was needed because “[t]he
arrival of the male practitioner signaled that the birth was
difficult” (Wilson, 1997: 163).
This unusual story informs us, as Wilson says, of “the
association of the male practitioner with difficulty and danger,
and the fact that Willughby’s relations with midwives were
27
Male midwives were usually summoned only when it was expected to be a
miscarriage or a case of the baby being stillborn, as these were more
difficult cases to handle. Willughby’s original manuscript is unavailable, as
it was written in 1672.
28
The real identity of her husband is plausibly Sir Gervase Bennet, “an
irascible Puritan, who was (as Willughby described him in the London
version) ‘one of Oliver’s creatures’, that is, a client of Cromwell’s, and who
was active both in London (where he had a minor government post) and in
Derby (where he served for a time as an alderman).” For this information
the critic Adrian Wilson consulted Gerald Aylmer (1997: 161, 175).