Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/65

 HISTORY OF OBSTETRICS Iv

as a distinct chair in the University of Pennsylvania. James is said to have been the first to induce premature labor for a contracted pelvis. He edited "Burns' Principles of Midwifery" in 1831, and Merriman's "Synopsis of the Various Kinds of Difficult Parturition" in 1816.

Walter Channing (1780-1876) was appointed lecturer of obstetrics in Harvard University in 1815. Between this date and 1824 some eleven new medical colleges or departments were founded, and in all obstetrics formed an obligatory or voluntary study.

Dr. Samuel Bard (1742-1821), the first professor of medicine in King's College, also made this quarter of a century notable by writing the first book on obstetrics in America entitled "A Compendium of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery " in 1807, a book which reached its fifth edition.

William Potts Dewees (1708-1841), of Philadelphia, next wrote his admirable "Compendious System of Midwifery" (1824) which had four- teen editions, and became the leading text-book, 9000 infant Philadel- phians attesting in cherubic strains to the veracity of his quoted experi- ence, and such was his fame that one lady — so it is said — delayed her accouchement a whole month because he was out of town.

J. W. Francis (1792-1869) of New York and C. D. Meigs of Phila- delphia translated and edited valuable European works. "The New York Medical Repository," the first medical journal in America, born in 1797, gathered into its pages valuable suggestions and essays; later, in 1839, Meigs embodied his views in his systematic work, "Philadelphia Practice of Midwifery" (1838).

By this time the obstetric infant occupied an honored place in the halls of medicine, though as late as the forties Samuel Gregory of Boston, and John Stevens from London, England, wrathfully de- nounced and exposed in a pamphlet "the danger and immorality" of employing "men in midwifery," Stevens even dedicating his labors to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The futility of their arguments was best shown by the fine folio of Hugh Lenox Hodge in 1864, on the "Principles and Practice of Obstetrics," illustrated by 159 lithographs from original photographs. For thirty-one years he had been a lecturer on obstetrics in the University of Pennsylvania, and at the age of seventy, with eye-sight almost gone, began this monumental book at once widely recognized and influential abroad, which laid the foundation of scientific obstetrics in America. Upon this basis Fordyce Barker, William F. Lusk, Charles Jewett, B. C. Hirst, J. Clifton Edgar and J. W. Williams have built their splendid superstructure of scientific investigation and teach- ing. In view of Hodge's great work in studying the parturient canal we to-day charitably forget his and Meigs' opposition to Holmes's new theory of puerperal contagion.