Part 23

PLAN. V.

PLAN

OF A

LYING-IN INSTITUTION.

FOR 40 (32 TO 36 OCCUPIED) BEDS.

WITH TRAINING SCHOOL FOR 30 PUPIL MIDWIVES.

W.F. OMMANNEY L^T. R. E. M & N HANHART, LITH. ]

REFERENCE.

A Administration

B Kitchen and Stores.

C Delivery Pavilions.

D Ward Pavilions

E Segregation Pavilion

APPENDIX.

MIDWIFERY AS A CAREER FOR EDUCATED WOMEN.

MY DEAR SISTERS (or rather, Chers et très-honorés Confrères),

While all that we women think about is to have the same education as men in medicine, must we not feel the women’s medical movement to be rather barren when it might be so fruitful?

But public opinion in England is not free enough for a coward to dare to say what she thinks, unless at the risk of having her head (figuratively) broken.

Is there not a much better thing for women than to be ‘medical men,’ and that is to be medical women?

Has not the cart been put before the horse in this women’s medical movement?

Here is a branch so entirely their own, that we may safely say that no lying-in would be attended but by a woman if a woman were as skilful as a man—a physician accoucheur.

Yet, instead of the ladies turning all their attention to this, and organising a midwifery school of the highest efficiency in both science and practice, they enter men’s classes, and lectures, and examinations, which don’t wish to have them, and say they want the same education as men.

Then, is there not an immense confusion as to whether they are ever to be called in as medical attendants to men?

‘No,’ say those lady doctors who have at all thought out the question. ‘We wish to be educated as if we were going to attend men, but we should think it an insult to be called in to attend men.’

Why not adjourn for a century, or for half a century, the question whether all branches of medical and surgical practice shall be exercised by women, even upon women? It is a question which may safely be left to settle itself.

But here is a matter so pressing, so universal, so universally recognised, viz., the preferable attendance of women upon women in midwifery, that it may really be summed up thus:—Although every woman would prefer a woman to attend upon her in her lying-in, and in diseases peculiar to her and her children, yet the woman does not exist, or hardly exists, to do it. Midwives are so ignorant that it is almost a term of contempt.

The rich woman cannot find fully qualified women, but only men to attend her, and the poor woman only takes unqualified women because she cannot afford to pay well qualified men.

But why should the midwives be ignorant? and why (in the great movement that there is now to make women into medical men) should not this branch, midwifery, which they will find no one to contest against them—not at least in the estimation of the patients—be the first ambition of cultivated women? Is there any rational doubt that, suppose there were a man and a woman, both equally versed in midwifery art and science, the woman would be the one sent for by all lying-in women?