author

William Clark

b. 1698

An 18th-century English physician best remembered for writing about childbirth and the role of midwives, he brought practical medical experience into print at a time when obstetrics was becoming a more public subject. His work offers a glimpse into medicine, debate, and everyday care in Georgian Britain.

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

Born in 1698, William Clark was a physician from Wiltshire. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he studied medicine at Leiden, earned an M.D. in 1727, practiced in London, and later moved to Bradford in Wiltshire. He retired from practice in 1772 and is believed to have died at Colchester around 1780.

Clark is chiefly associated with The Province of Midwives in the Practice of Their Art (1751), a book that reflects the medical arguments of its day about childbirth and professional authority. Modern catalog records, including the Wellcome Collection, identify him as William Clark, 1698 to about 1780, and connect him with that work.

For readers today, Clark is interesting not only as a medical writer but as a witness to a changing world of healthcare. His surviving work sits at the meeting point of learned medicine, practical obstetrics, and the long history of how childbirth was understood and managed.