author

William Clark

b. 1698

An 18th-century physician and medical writer, he is best remembered for challenging the growing role of male practitioners in childbirth and for defending the place of midwives in maternal care.

1 Audiobook

The Province of Midwives in the Practice of their Art Instructing them in the timely knowledge of such difficulties as require the assistance of Men, for the preservation of Mother and Child; very necessary for the perusal of all the sex interested in the subject, and interspersed with some New and Useful Observations.

The Province of Midwives in the Practice of their Art Instructing them in the timely knowledge of such difficulties as require the assistance of Men, for the preservation of Mother and Child; very necessary for the perusal of all the sex interested in the subject, and interspersed with some New and Useful Observations.

by William Clark

About the author

William Clark (born in 1698, and described by later catalogues as dying around 1780) was a British physician from Wiltshire. The Royal College of Physicians records that he studied medicine at Leyden, entered there in 1726 at age twenty-eight, earned his M.D. in 1727, and was admitted as a Licentiate of the College in 1736.

He is chiefly known today for The Province of Midwives in the Practice of their Art (1751), a work published in Bath. In it, he argued that midwives should be properly trained and respected, and he pushed back against the increasing medical takeover of childbirth by men. That makes him an interesting figure in the history of obstetrics: both a physician and a critic of his profession’s expanding authority.

Reliable portrait evidence was not easy to confirm from the sources I found, so no image is included here.