Traditional Nursing In The 1800s

For centuries, traditional medicine has been infused with a masculine bias, often to the disadvantage of both doctors and patients. Women have always been central in providing medical care, whether offering remedies in the home, nursing or acting as midwives. However, the medical profession has been male dominated for most of its history. In Europe this came about from the 1400s, when many cities and governments decided that only those trained in universities were allowed to formally practice medicine. As women were not allowed into the universities they could not gain a license. It was only in the 1900s, after much struggle, that women won the right to study and practice medicine in the same way as men. Despite being excluded from formal education,
The Chamberlain brothers developed forceps in the early 1600s, which remained a family secret until the 1730s. Their use of a new tool and their professional training allowed such man-midwives to claim that they were more scientific than their female ‘competitors’.
It was through nursing that women first made significant inroads into formal medical practice. Changes in nursing started with the hospital and prison reformers of the late 1700s. New training for nurses became available, notably at the Deaconess Institute at Kaiserworth in Germany (1836), which influenced Florence Nightingale. Nightingale reorganised army hospital nursing during the Crimean War (1853-56), while Jamaican healer Mary Seacole attended the wounded in the camps and set up her own nursing home. Florence Nightingale helped promote nursing as a more respectable profession for young women. The nursing role was seen as an extension of women's social role: caring and nurturing and Florence Nightingale believed nurses should be subordinate to doctors; she was against women healers and the registration of nurses and opposed the three year formal training of them. She also wouldn’t
Midwife, from the Old English, literally means ‘with woman’. Before the 1700s, childbirth was customarily a domestic event, attended by female friends, relatives and local women experienced in delivering children. A more technological approach to childbirth gained momentum during the 1700s. Professional medical men were the focus. Over time female midwives lost status and came to be portrayed as unenlightened, unhygienic and entwined with superstition and folklore. Modern obstetrics is a hi-tech hospital-based specialty of men and women but it’s origins are the appearance of so-called man-midwives. Women dealt with straightforward births. However, male physicians were often called when complications needed physical intervention. They often carried destructive instruments to remove dead, obstructed foetuses. The most influential early man-midwife in Britain was William Smellie. He was a leading teacher of obstetrics, midwifery and forceps use. Despite growing professionalisation, man-midwives only found real respectability in the early 1800s, when they gained approval among the upper classes. Families who could afford their fees increasingly ‘called for the doctor’, invariably male. Female midwives became unfashionable, outmoded and associated with the poor. This gradual shift was criticised. midwife Martha Ballard recorded her displeasure, and another midwife Sarah Stone complained