The Chamberlen Obstetric Forceps

In 1813 a later occupant of the Chamberlen family's old house found the family's obstetric forceps hidden under a trapdoor in the attic. Made in the early 17th century, they had been used in secret by the Chamberlens for more than a century before such instruments came into general use. The Royal Society of Medicine gave them to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1957.

Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France, the Chamberlens settled in England. The sources disagree on the date: the Dittrick Museum at Case Western Reserve University gives 1569, the International Museum of Surgical Science 1596. William Chamberlen's two sons, both named Peter, practiced man-midwifery. One of them, probably Peter the elder, devised a hinged instrument with two blunt, spoon-shaped blades that could grip the baby's head and guide it out, so that a child could be delivered alive in a difficult labor. Peter the elder became midwife to Queen Henrietta Maria.

Secrecy was part of the business. They drove to births in closed carriages, and according to a story repeated in both museum accounts they carried the instrument in a huge gilded box that took two people to lift. Everyone else had to leave the room, and the mother was blindfolded. Both brothers clashed with the College of Physicians, which had Peter the elder jailed for prescribing medicines outside its rules.

It leaked in a later generation. Hugh Chamberlen went to France to show what the forceps could do, failed to deliver a woman in obstructed labor and came home with nothing, and the Dittrick account says he later sold the secret, though the design had already got out. Versions appeared across Europe, and William Smellie brought forceps into open use in the mid-18th century.