History of the Chair of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in the University of Edinburgh : an introductory lecture / by Alexander Russell Simpson.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of the Chair of Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children in the University of Edinburgh : an introductory lecture / by Alexander Russell Simpson. 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.

    12/24 (page 10)
    surgeons, or formed part of the instruction given by the incum- bents of other chairs. In London—always anomalous in its provision for medical in- struction—there was room, thirteen years later, for the advent of the Scottish country doctor wlio migrated from Lanark to the great metropolis, and quickly gathered crowds of eager students to the lectures which he gave in his own house (perhaps in Wardour Street, Soho), with its paper lantern over the door, on which was written, Midwifery taught here for five shillings. For though his name is almost a synonym for the glory of British midwifery, William Smellie was only a private practitioner. In Paris his great contemporary, Levret, wrought and taught as one of the medical officers of the Hotel Dieu, and with the title of accoucheur to the Dauphiness. Great surgeons and physicians, like Astruc, Dionis, Deleurye, might give courses of lectures on obstetrics, but a professorship of midwifery was not instituted in the University of Paris till a century after our patrons had set their chair in the University of Edinburgh. It was fitting that Strasburg—first with the printing-press— should be first on the Continent with a ])rofessorship of midwifery, dating, according to Kilian, from 1728. Strasburg was then a French city; and the man who was to occupy the first distinc- tively obstetric chair in Germany was only iDorn there in May 1726, the year in which the Edinburgh chair was instituted. It was thus not till another generation that Roederer began his brilliant and too brief career in Gottingen. If we turn to Holland, rich in universities, we note a work appearing in the beginning of last century that might almost be called epoch-making ; but the author of it, Henry Deventer, was no professor. He seems to have been a general practitioner at the Hague, with a good scientific training, observant and thoughtful, pious and self-denying, and blessed withal with a helpmeet who was herself an accomplished midwife. In the universities, mid- wifery, as far as it was taught at all, seems to have been taken up by whatever professor had most liking for the subject as part of his course. In the University of Amsterdam it was taught one month per annum by Ptuysch, Professor of Anatomy, who was famous for having collected two anatomical museums. When the first of them was bought by Peter the Great, to be carried to St Peters- burg, he set himself to provide a second for iiis own university. As for Belgium, Palfyn, who first gave forceps to the world, was Demonstratcur en Chirurgie at Ghent. In Italy we find, from Corradi's Obstetricia in Italia, that Victor Amadous II. of Piedmont started the first school for teaching in Turin in 1728, by setting apart a ward in the San Giovanni Hos- pital for lying-in women, where midwives should have practical instruction. At Bologna, after the model of which some of our Scottish universities M'ere established, the first obstetrical professor Avas Gian-Antonio Galli, who in 1717 was appointed professor of