'The knowledge of things': Jane Sharp's art of midwifery
Jane Sharp's 1671 'The Midwives Book' used humour and common sense to educate women about pregnancy and birth.
Almost no biographical information survives about the English midwife, Jane Sharp. In 1671, she wrote a book that sought to educate midwives in anatomy, to inform expectant mothers about pregnancy and childbirth, and to defend the practice of midwifery as a female-only occupation. I wish we knew more about her life and career – through the Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration and the plague, she must have delivered hundreds of babies with the compassionate, no-nonsense attitude that emanates from her writing.
The title page of The Midwives Book describes Sharp as ‘practitioner in the Art of MIDWIFRY above thirty years’, from which we can make a very rough guess that she was born around 1620. The 1725 edition (called The Compleat Midwife’s Companion) gives the length of her career as 40 years, suggesting that she was still in practice in 1681 but had either died or retired by 1691. It is possible that ‘Jane Sharp’ was a pseudonym. No one, however, knows.
The Midwives Book is the first midwifery manual written in English by a woman - most textbooks of the time were by male authors, some of whom had limited practical experience of attending births. Sharp begins her book with a letter to the midwives of England, addressing them as ‘sisters’. She laments the miseries experienced by women in the hands of unskilled practitioners and explains that she aims to rectify the lack of anatomical knowledge among midwives. This she proceeds to do in a detailed yet straightforward tone, without any coyness about genitalia or sexuality - as she says, ‘we Women have no more cause to be angry, or be ashamed of what Nature hath given us, than Men have, we cannot be without ours, no more than they can want theirs’.
Midwives in Sharp’s time learnt through informal apprenticeship to an experienced practitioner and were then expected to obtain an episcopal licence from the Church of England, which involved paying a fee and providing references attesting to their skill. Not all midwives, however, sought a licence, and the practice of licensing fell by the wayside during the Interregnum. Midwifery was still very much a female province, but male surgeons were beginning to establish the role of the ‘man-midwife’, which would increasingly threaten women’s livelihoods in the century to come.
Practical experience was paramount, but Jane Sharp recognised that if midwives were able to study anatomy too, the welfare of mothers and babies would improve.
The trouble was, women were excluded from the universities and therefore from classical texts written in Latin and Greek. Women ‘cannot attain so rarely to the knowledge of things as men may, who are bred up in universities, Schools of learning, or serve their Apprenticeships for that end and purpose’.
‘It is commonly maintain’d,’ she notes disapprovingly, ‘that the Masculine Gender is more worthy than the Femenine.’
Sharp said that she had gone to great expense to obtain translations of current European midwifery manuals, and intended to disseminate their information in the vernacular. She reworked and reorganised these materials in a way that would now be considered plagiarism but which was a common means of compiling a book at the time. Divided into six parts, The Midwives Book covers reproductive anatomy, conception, infertility, the approach of labour, childbirth and the common diseases of women and children.
Added to this theoretical knowledge is Sharp’s own forthright and colloquial tone, which appears more in the later editions. She brings in humorous asides - in a chapter on menstruation, for example, she notes that the term ‘Menstrua’ could be ‘Monstrua’, ‘for it is a Monstrous thing that no creature but a woman hath them.’ She comments wryly upon the story of a Frenchman who complained that his wife’s vagina had ‘grown as a sack’ after many years of marriage. ‘Perhaps the fault was not the Woman’s, but his own, his Weapon shrunk, and grown too little for the scabbard.’
A French remedy for male infertility caused by an enchantment or charm held that the man should ‘piss through his Wifes Wedding Ring, and not to spill a Drop, and then he shall be perfectly cured.’ Sharp does not say whether she believes this to be true, but there is a tone of dismissive scepticism in her comment: ‘Let him try it that pleaseth.’
Even the writers on whom she relies for her information are subject to a mild dig:
‘but that I may not trouble the Reader with needless repetitions of the same things, as too many authours doe, which breeds tediousness, and can give little or no satisfaction at all.’
The book is not only a manual for midwives themselves, but also offers information and reassurance for women facing childbirth. She encourages women to understand and appreciate their bodies' changes and functions during pregnancy and labour, fostering a sense of agency over their reproductive health. Contrary to some male writers who believed labouring women should remain in one position, Sharp writes:
‘Take notice that all Women do not keep the same posture in their delivery; some lie in their Beds, being very weak, some sit in a Stool or Chair, or rest upon the side of the Bed, held by other Women that come to the Labour.’
The image of ‘women that come to the Labour’ evokes the sense of community and support that Sharp clearly believed were essential for the well-being of mother and baby. One can imagine her cheerfully taking charge of a birthing chamber, keeping the woman’s spirits up with her kindly and jovial bedside manner.
‘… it being the Natural Propriety of Women to be much Seeing into that Art; and tho’ Nature be not alone sufficient to the Perfection of it, yet farther Knowledge may be gain’d by a long and diligent Practice, and be communicated to others of our own Sex.’
This was a rare female-only space that ‘men-midwives’ were beginning to encroach on, and The Midwives Book is a witty and erudite riposte to the notion that men’s access to scientific and theoretical knowledge should give them precedence over women’s practical expertise.
The Midwives Book, Or the whole art of midwifry discovered (1671) and its 1725 edition, The Compleat Midwife’s Companion, or The Art of Midwifry Improv’d are available to read online.
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Granta, 11 April 2024, Hardback £16.99 ISBN: 9781783789054
An ache, a pain, a mysterious lump, a strange sensation in some part of your body, the feeling that something is not right. The fear that something is, in fact, very wrong. These could be symptoms of illness. But they could also be the symptoms of hypochondria – an enigmatic condition that might be physiological or psychological or both. In this landmark book, Caroline Crampton tells the story of hypochondria, beginning in the age of Hippocrates and taking us right through to the wellness industry today.
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