On the history and use of the short straight midwifery forceps as a tractor, and of the long double curved forceps as a compressor and lever / by Thomas More Madden.

Date:
[1875?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the history and use of the short straight midwifery forceps as a tractor, and of the long double curved forceps as a compressor and lever / by Thomas More Madden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    designed for the same purpose, and described in works with which Dr. Paul Chamberlen, who lived at a time when medical literature was circulated in a language common to the learned in all countries, could hardly have failed to be conversant. The forceps is not mentioned by any of the known Greek or Roman medical writers, whose obstetric knowledge, however, with the exception of Celsus, was extremely limited. For midwifery was then almost exclusively confined to female practitioners, the higher class of whom, the Medicce, or impivai, were entirely distinct from the Obstetrices, or yaiai, as the mere midwives were called, and appear to have corresponded very closely to the “ lady-doctors ” of the present day, and we have evidence that the forceps, or something of the same kind, intended for the same purpose, was not unknown to the latter at least eighteen hundred years ago, in the discovery of a similar instrument in the house of a Roman obstetrix in the excavations at Pompeii.11 The first known reference to the forceps is that of Avicenna, the Arabian physician of the tenth century, whose works were translated into Latin, and published at Basle, in 1556, by Andrew Alpago, from whose edition I have taken the following chapter, in which the author refers distinctly to the use of the forceps for the delivery of living children in cases of difficult labour, and makes this more evident by going on to direct that, in case the midwife fails with the forceps, she must then resort to embryotomy, as in the case of a dead child:—“ Cap. 26. De Regimine ejus cujus partus sit difficilis causa maguitudinis foetus— Oportet obstetrix bonafaciat retentione hujusmodi foetus : quare subtiliter in extractione ejus paulatim; tunc si valeat illud in eo, bene est; et se non liget eum cum margine panni, et trahat eum subtiliter attractione post attractionem. Quod si illud non conferet, administrentur forcipes, et extrahatur cum eis. Si vero non eonfert illud, extrahatur cum incisione, secundum quod facile sit, et regatur regimine foetus mortui.” b A century after the time we find two midwifery instruments, which, in the Latin version, are mentioned as “ Forcipes,” were described by Albucasis—i.e., the long forceps, or Almisdach, and the short forceps, or Misdach; but these instruments, from their construction, were obviously a Adams. Translation of Paulus ./Egineta. Vol. I., p. 652. b Avicenna Medicorum Arabuni Principis, Libres Canonis de Medieinis, Cordialibus et Cantica jam olim quidem a Gerardo Carmonensi ex Arabico sermone in Latinum conversa et partia vero ab Andrea Alpago infinitis penecorrectionibus, &c. P. 724. Basil®: 1556. N