British Lying-In Hospital

British Lying-In Hospital
The 1849 British Lying-In Hospital building in Endell Street, photographed in 2013
Geography
Location	Brownlow Street and later Endell Street, Holborn, London, England, United Kingdom
Coordinates	51°30′53″N 0°07′29″W / 51.51485°N 0.12479°W / 51.51485; -0.12479Coordinates: 51°30′53″N 0°07′29″W / 51.51485°N 0.12479°W / 51.51485; -0.12479
Organisation
Hospital type	Maternity
Services
Emergency department	No Accident & Emergency
Beds	20, later 40
History
Founded	1749, moved 1849
Closed	1913
Links
Lists	Hospitals in England

The British Lying-In Hospital was a maternity hospital established in London 1749, the second such foundation in the capital.

The impetus for the creation of a dedicated lying-in hospital was dissatisfaction on the part of the governors of the Middlesex Hospital with maternity facilities in that hospital. A new hospital with 20 beds was established in 1749 in Brownlow Street, Long Acre, Holborn, under the presidency of the 2nd Duke of Portland, and initially called the Lying-In Hospital for Married Women. Consequent on the establishment of the 1750 City of London Lying-In Hospital, and the 1752 General Lying-In Hospital (later renamed the Queen Charlotte's Hospital), the Holborn hospital changed its name to the British Lying-In Hospital. It moved to a new purpose-built building with 40 beds in Endell Street, in 1849.

The hospital was funded by voluntary subscriptions and donations. At the outset, the hospital provided only for in-patients, but by 1828 extended to an out-patient service, supervising home deliveries. In the 1870s, it was treating about 750 in-patients per annum.

The creation of the hospital was not without controversy at the time, and the nature, characteristics and effects of the British in particular, and maternity hospitals in general, continue to be a subject of study. Prior to the hospital's creation, childbirth was for the most-part a domestic affair relying on the good offices of largely untrained (if well-experienced) midwives; only the upper echelons of society tended to be served by male physicians. The British Lying-In Hospital offered — to married women only — a largely female-only space removed from the home in which childbirth was supervised almost exclusively by female midwives under the supervision of female matrons. The intervention of male physicians was a rare event.

The hospital was attacked within the first two years of operation by Frank Nicholls, a prominent physician who issued, anonymously, a satirical essay, the Petition of the Unborn Babes, which raised a number of concerns questioning the involvement of (allegedly brutal) men-midwives, and asserting high mother and baby mortality rates. Nicholls publication can be seen to set the tone for much of the subsequent discussion of maternity hospitals to this day. Nicholls' received a response with the publication of A Vindication of Man Midwifery, 1752, but the debate about Man Midwifery and the use of forceps raged for at least the next century.