As little progress had been made in obstetrics as in other branches of applied medicine or surgery. The custom of employing midwives was general, and these, for the most part, were ignorant and filthy old women, slaves of routine procedures that had obtained from time immemorial. Educated accoucheurs were called only in extraordinary cases; but with progress the prejudice which excluded educated physicians from the practice of midwifery gradually gave{166} way, and there was opened for obstetrics a new era. In the beginning of the seventeenth century the initiative was taken by Louise Bourgeois, the _sage femme_ of Marie de Medicis, who in 1626 published a collection of observations concerning sterility, abortion, fecundity, accouchement, and diseases of women and children generally; it embodied several distinctly new ideas. A little later (in 1668), Mauriceau, of Paris, chief accoucheur to the Hôtel-Dieu, published his treatise on diseases of pregnancy and childbirth, which was translated into all the languages of Europe and became a powerful agent for good, not alone that it represented an advance in knowledge, but it stimulated such rivals and successors as Devanter, Peu, Paul Portal, and Delamotte to further research. About this time the Chamberlains, an English family devoted to the practice of midwifery, invented an instrument to facilitate the extraction of the foetal head when arrested, and one of them went to Paris, and, failing of success there, went on to Holland, where he sold his secret to two Dutch practitioners, who kept it only too faithfully. In 1721, Palfvn, a surgeon of Ghent, while seeking to fathom the device of the Chamberlains, conceived a _tire tête_ (literally a head-drawer) composed of two steel spoons, and hastened to publish an account thereof,--a praiseworthy act, whereby he merits distinction as the inventor of the forceps. As modified by Smellie in England and Levret in France, the obstetrical forceps ranks among the most useful discoveries of modern surgery, and, although not in common use until about a century ago, it may be said that the invention has been the means of saving the lives of countless women and children.