Chapter 4 #2
The doctor stood, sputtering. Nora raised her hands for silence. “We are here to learn something new, are we not? We’ll return to my lecture, but first I’d very much like to hear Mrs. Franklin’s account.”
Of all days for Horace to be gone. He’d have shouted them down by now, and they’d have listened, cowed and silent in their seats.
“The face were pointed this way,” Mrs. Franklin proceeded, gingerly placing the model baby above the open cadaver, her voice shaking as she let slip poor grammar that only made the men scowl more.
“Right mento-anterior position,” Nora announced for the doctors taking notes. No one did.
“Did you tip the chin down or rotate the head?” Nora asked.
“Neither. I rotated the mother. I rolled her to her side and brought her knees up, keeping pressure on the bottom of the mother’s—” She hesitated, as if suddenly aware of the critical men looking on. “Her—” She was searching for a term that wouldn’t embarrass herself.
“Her vulva,” Nora finished neatly.
Mrs. Franklin nodded.
“She doesn’t know the simplest terms,” one man pointed out. “This isn’t a lecture. It’s a story hour. Fairy stories, as far as I can tell.”
Heat rose from Nora’s stomach into her chest, pulsing with her heartbeat.
“I might not know your foreign names,” Mrs. Franklin retorted, “but I know where to apply pressure so the mother doesn’t tear clear through, and how to bring a baby face-first without using your lethal hooks.”
Nora shivered from a bleak and poisonous memory.
She’d once been with Horace when he was forced to use the blunt crotchet for a mother who’d labored for two days without the head descending.
Afterward, he’d stumbled home and drunk himself into a stupor, saying he feared the child was still alive when he’d done it.
“What are you saying?” A portly doctor stood, his mustache bristling. “I’ve been begged by midwives to use the crotchet to save a woman.” He pointed his quill at Nora in a threatening manner. “It’s surgeons who step in when midwives are out of their depth.”
“Physicians attend more births than surgeons,” a bearded man shot back.
Not this.
She couldn’t afford any more fractures in this audience. Surgeons and physicians in England hadn’t made peace in the last fifty years. Neither group cared much for apothecaries, and all of them judged midwifery most inferior of all.
Nora raised her voice. “Regardless, we have an opportunity to learn—”
“From them?” a man mocked, gesturing at Mrs. Franklin and her companions.
Nora gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. “In Bologna, doctors work side by side with midwives and nuns, consulting them, often deferring to their years of expertise. They are women dedicated to the science of childbirth, always amassing new experience.”
“What science?” one medical student asked timidly. “Birth is natural. We certainly didn’t invent the procedure, and indigenous women give birth with hardly any trouble, according to—”
“You’ll know how important education is the first time you’re faced with a placenta previa, or breech delivery, or—” Nora tried to regain order, but they were all speaking over one another now.
“Maybe some midwives are skilled,” the bearded man admitted. “But there is no licensing. No regulation. No exams. Think of the damage a rogue woman—”
“It’s not so different for us.” Nora cut him off. “The current guidelines for physicians and surgeons suggest we attend two lectures on midwifery. That means you could leave here today half-finished with your education on childbirth.”
One of the midwives burst out in a humorless laugh. “I was called to a birth last week after the family realized the qualified doctor had no clue what he was about. He knew nothing about turning the child or lessening the pains.”
“We are not in the business of abating pain. We are in the business of keeping mother and child alive,” an older man called from the back.
“Sometimes that’s the same thing!” the midwife retorted. “Sometimes easing the pain is a matter of life and death. If the mother is frightened, she cannot obtain the correct positions—”
“The pains force her into the correct position eventually.” The man crossed his arms as if the argument were over.
It wasn’t. Shouts from both sides only mounted.
“Stop!” Nora’s voice snapped sharp and clear in the commotion.
She scanned the men in varying states of agitation.
“If you want to leave, please do so now so we can get back to work. I need to know how to bring a child safely through a mento-anterior birth, and if none of you can answer my question, I have a woman here who says she can. I’m sure Dr. Horace Croft will be thrilled to hear her account. ”
Not even the name of her mentor could persuade them all. Three more men gathered their papers and exited in a cloud of grumbles and discontent. To Nora’s surprise, the rest stayed, their skeptical eyebrows raised and curiosity twitching the edges of their mouths.
“Perhaps we can get on now,” Nora continued, smoothing the sides of her skirt to dry her palms. She gestured the midwife forward. “Mrs. Franklin?”