Jane Sharp

[5] As a midwife, Sharp may have been educated, but unlike male surgeons of the time, midwives rarely received formal medical training.

[12][13] Its length and price suggest a higher-class target audience, but whereas its text is aimed mainly at practising midwives, beginning with a direct address:

I Have often sate down sad in the Consideration of the many Miseries Women endure in the Hands of unskilful Midwives; many professing the Art (without any skill in Anatomy, which is the Principal part effectually necessary for a Midwife) meerly for Lucres sake.

[13] Later editions, including the posthumous The Compleat Midwife's Companion published in 1724, states that Sharp had practised "above forty years".

[18] By writing in the vernacular, she conveyed surgical and pharmacological techniques to women training to be midwives, so that they need not always depend on male physicians when birthing complications or emergencies arose.

Her use of commonplacing allowed Sharp to integrate existing academic knowledge of anatomy, childbirth and women's health, while adding her practical expertise.

[22][9] For instance, she cites ancient scientific understanding of the humorous body as developed and used by Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, which presumed that a woman's menstrual blood feeds a fetus.

She then explains the dominant hypothesis of her day, from "Fernelius, Pliny, Columells, and Columbus", who claimed that menstrual blood poisoned a fetus.

[13] Sharp stresses how practice and experience in combination with medical texts produces the best clinician, not theoretical knowledge alone: '"It is not hard words that perform the work, as if none understood the Art that cannot understand Greek.

She acknowledged that men had better access to education and tended to have greater theoretical knowledge, but she deplored their lack of practical understanding.

[16] Complaining of the inadequacies in female education, she noted that "women cannot attain so rarely to the knowledge of things as many [men] may, who are bred up in universities.

Rather than consult midwives and mothers, they drew on ancient Greek translations and other midwifery manuals written by inexperienced men.

Such writers exhibited a grotesque fascination with female sexuality,[13] reflecting an understanding of women as hypersexual, excessive, weak, and inferior beings, valuable solely in terms of usefulness to men.

The Midwives Book: or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered gave valuable advice at a time when midwifery faced change.