“It seems a waste of your time and entrance fee to leave before she’s even had a chance to answer my question,” Nora called after him.
He didn’t reply, and it was easy to see that others were thinking of following. She lived with enough doctors to know their minds were not solely scientific. They were all painted with a vivid streak of drama. Perhaps herself included.
“Mrs. Franklin. Would you come show me how the child presented and how you delivered? As well as explain the aftereffects.” She held out the crude doll in invitation.
Mrs. Franklin hesitated, starting to refuse.
“If you’re telling the truth,” Nora goaded.
The woman’s face went from pink to crimson. Just as planned,Nora had struck her pride. Mrs. Franklin climbed down the risers and opened the gate to enter the demonstration floor. “Lying on the back is fine for some deliveries,” she said with a serious frown. “But all the doctors I know dismiss the other birthing positions.”
“Good Lord, are we going to discuss medieval birthing stools next?” one man complained.
Mrs. Franklin’s brow contracted. “You haven’t brought hundreds of women through. A stool is a necessity for some of them.”
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 opportunityto 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—”
