by Diane Morris | Mar 12, 2015 | Childbirth
It was not the case that only midwives could be ignorant and incompetent. Some man-midwives were equally injurious when delivering children, despite being trained under doctors and man-midwives who taught classes and used obstetrical machines or phantoms. Mistaking...
by Diane Morris | Feb 19, 2015 | Childbirth
For most of human history midwives ruled the roost when it came to delivering children, as you may have read in my previous post on Regency midwives. Man-midwives or accoucheurs, as they were known in France, were called to a delivery only when there was a problem or...
by Diane Morris | Feb 5, 2015 | Childbirth, Medicine
The Regency midwives Margaret Stephen and Martha Mears appear to have been hard-working, knowledgeable, and competent. (See my previous post on these famous midwives.) Margaret Stephen defined her craft as “the art of delivering women safely of their children, and...
by Diane Morris | Jan 8, 2015 | Childbirth, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Many women today can choose when to become pregnant, thanks to the availability of safe and reliable contraceptives.1 It wasn’t always so. During the Regency period women were often pregnant every few years, beginning within the first or second year of marriage and...
by Diane Morris | Sep 25, 2014 | Childbirth, Medicine
Thanks to Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, the character of Anne de Bourgh is forever fixed as “sickly and cross”1—which begs a question: Why is she so disagreeable? In my Regency novel, Rosings Park, Anne has two reasons to be cross as crabs....
