Sworn midwife: Mistress Katharine Manley of Whitby, her work and world

‘There is no formal memorial to Mrs Manley’s near half-century of service to the people of Whitby. Yet her diary, a veritable gold mine for the genealogist and for the social historian, remains with us, enormously enriching our understanding of a vital aspect of a bygone age.’ (p. 34)

A page from Midwife Manley's diary (1720-1764)
A page from Midwife Manley’s diary (1720-1764)

With acknowledgements to MIDIRS, we are pleased to provide online access to a paper about the Whitby midwife Mistress Katharine Manley, whose  diary can be found in the museum in Whitby. The diary documents her 44 years of experience from 1720 to 1764.   

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Sworn midwife: Mistress Katharine Manley of Whitby, her work and world

Written by Dr Jean Donnison and published in MIDIRS Midwifery Digest  in 2007 17(1):25-34.  

De-medicalisation of breast feeding …

Wellcome Collection image: Madonna and child showing breast feeding. Milan. Musee Poldi-Pezzolige

In 1982 Chloe Fisher, who has dedicated much of her life to educating midwives and women on infant feeding and to supporting breast feeding mothers, published a historical review of  modern breastfeeding ‘management’ and the origins of certain restrictive practices which prevailed for a considerable time during the twentieth century. While contemporary medical experts were advocating limiting the duration of initial breast feeds and no night feeds, at the end of this paper Chloe highlights the words of those who challenged such notions but whose work had hitherto been largely unrecognised. The following is a quotation from the concluding paragraphs of her paper:

‘Early in this decade [the 1950s] two well designed research projects (Illingworth and Stone, 1952: Newton, 1952) came to the conclusion that removing the restrictions would aid the establishment of lactation and reduce the incidence of problems. Other work led the author of a comprehensive history of infant feeding to say, of self-demand feeding,“When this regime becomes universally adopted, as surely it will, so the last chapter on the history of infant feeding will be concluded” (Wickes, 1953). That was in 1953!  

In the developed world, slavish adherence to the earlier theories probably did as much harm to human lactation as the promotion of artificial feeds. But that we should have been guilty of taking these ideas to the developing countries, where artificial feeding can cause gross malnutrition, if not death, should make us pause for serious thought. How did it take another 20 years for the hoped-for improvements to begin to occur here? There is no simple answer, but a large contribution to the delay must have come from the rapid increase in hospital confinements, as it was in hospitals that these practices were firmly established. The rapid and happy changes that are now taking place owe much to the insistence of the many mothers who wish to breastfeed their babies. For the few professionals who are deeply concerned to increase breastfeeding, both for the sake of the mothers and their babies, exciting and rewarding times lie ahead.’ 

The UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative World Breast Feeding Week (August 1st–7th 2018) ended recently. In the UK, the week was preceded by a sensational Channel 4 film in the Dispatches series, ‘Breast feeding uncovered’,  which explored the experience of breast feeding mothers today through the eyes of a breast feeding investigative journalist. It would appear that, while many women are now motivated to breast feed, society’s attitude towards feeding in public and the recognition of its benefits to babies and families and ultimately to society, could be better.

J C Allotey 09/08/18

References

Fisher, C. (1982). Mythology in midwifery – or “making breastfeeding scientific and exact”. Oxford Medical School Gazette, Trinity Term, 30-33.

Illingworth, R.S., and D.G.H. Stone (1952). Self demand feeding in a maternity unit. Lancet, 1, 683.

Newton, N. (1952). Nipple pain and nipple damage. Journal of Pediatrics, 41, 411

Wickes, I.G. (1953). A history of infant feeding. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 128, 151

 

 

 

 

 

Keep in contact with De Partu

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The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force on May 25th 2018, requires that De Partu provide its members and “followers” with specific details of the personal information that is held on record about them, and obtain explicit, current consent for specific uses of that information for communication purposes.

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BSHM medicinal plants lectures and Poynter Lecture

Royal College of Physicians Medicinal plants lectures and the Poynter Lecture of the British Society for the History of Medicine
Monday 11th June 1.30pm-7.00pm
Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, Regents Park, London, NW1 4LE

Plants in Anaesthesia by Dr David Wilkinson, former consultant anaesthetist, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and historian of anaesthesia
A history of plant products used in general and local anaesthesia, including curare, opium, cocaine – and lettuce!
Unicorn Horn and London Treacle:  by Tony Cartwright, retired pharmaceutical regulatory consultant
The story of the College’s Pharmacopeia Londinensis on its 400th anniversary

Poynter Lecture of the British Society for the History of Medicine, 6.00pm:
The Doctor as Collector by Dr Simon Chaplin, Director of Culture and Society at the Wellcome Trust, and previously Head of the Wellcome Library

The price of £10 allows entry to all the lectures on this day, the garden tour and wine reception – booking is now open.

New image gallery for the De Partu website: launch of an appeal for images of midwives’ badges


Wouldn’t it be timely to compile a gallery of as many former midwifery ‘training’ school badges as possible, before they are lost?  Former schools of midwifery often produced their own badges, sometimes with interesting coats of arms or mottos on them. We have made a start with this: members can view them in our image library. Has this tradition of awarding badges been continued by contemporary higher education  institutions? …

Study day: Education for practitioners and prospective parents during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

Trinity College, Oxford

May 5th 2018

This study day is part of  the Knowledge Exchange Partnership between The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), the De Partu History of Childbirth Group, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. The day will focus on the history of midwives’ and obstetricians’ professional education and ways of working together, and aspects of the history of parent education. The programme will include several PhD student presentations.

Details of the programme, and of nearby parking and accommodation, are available on the Events page.


Royal College of Midwives Archives

Books for sale

Books for sale

De Partu is currently holding an online sale of secondhand and rare books to raise funds for the Jean Donnison History of Childbirth Student Essay Prize. They include potentially useful primary and secondary sources for historical research which are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, some being out of print. The prices have been checked, and aim to be competitive.  All books may be purchased from Amazon via the De Partu ‘store’.

Victorian values: an image of the Virgin Mary bottle feeding!

York Minster Nave: Nativity boss (1840)

The Nativity Boss

York Minster was built between 1220 and 1472 and is one of the great Gothic cathedrals of England and Europe. In the course of the last two centuries, it has suffered three catastrophic fires with the second, in 1840, destroying the roof of the nave.

The nave roof is decorated with a series of eight bosses that depict the life of the Virgin Mary, a figure of great devotion in Catholic Christendom during the medieval period. The second of the bosses depicts the nativity, the birth of Christ in a stable in Bethlehem. The original boss showed a magnificent ox and ass, a shepherd, angels, the manger and, at the centre, the seated figure of the Virgin with her eyes raised to heaven, breastfeeding the infant Jesus.

In 1834, a local artist, John Browne, made detailed sketches of the nave bosses during maintenance work in the Minster. These sketches were the primary source for the huge restoration that took place following the 1840 fire. All the bosses were restored exactly as Browne had depicted them, except for the nativity boss. Apparently, in response to Victorian preferences for extreme modesty in social settings and church adornments, the restored boss depicted the Virgin bottle-feeding her baby, rather than breastfeeding!

Kindly contributed by Professor Mary Nolan, who is also an official York Minster guide.