I am somewhat cynical about his claims to expertise

I have over the last year or so become intrigued by the popular - at least, from the number of copies of his works that turn up on the secondhand market, I assume he was popular - writer of works in the general field of sexology in the early twentieth century, George Ryley Scott (1886-1955). This was partly due to discovering a somewhat startling assertion in one of the entries in Scott's Encyclopaedia of Sex (1939) which made me want to explore how authoritative one might consider him.

On the whole I think he can be put down as somebody who made a good living (one presumes) from churning out works of advice on sex, marriage, birth control, and venereal disease, studies of Curious customs of sex and marriage, Phallic worship: a history of sex and sexual rites, The History of Torture, The History of Corporal Punishment, A History of Prostitution and Far Eastern Sex Life. He also wrote on nudism, the laws of obscenity, poultry-keeping, cock-fighting, and tips for writing. Many of his works were first published by T. Werner Laurie, characterised by Wikipedia as 'a publisher of books that were avant-garde in some cases, racy in others' or Torchstream, which seems to have concentrated on the racy.

He does not seem to be what one might call a practising sexologist: he was not a medical doctor and does not seem to have been part of the circles in which these discussions were taking place. He did apparently apply for membership in the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology in 1927 but there is no mention of proposer or seconder and the application does not seem to have been proceeded with (Minutes of the British Sexology Society in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).

The National Birth Control Association was not prepossessed by his work on birth control. EF Griffith reported to the Medical Subcommittee on 3 March 1935 'that "Birth Control" by G Ryley Scott appeared to be in every way unsatisfactory and inaccurate'; it was decided to recommend to the publishers to withdraw the book, offering a list of the current literature on the subject  'which might cause him to be better informed'. In May the Executive Committee sent a letter to Ryley Scott suggesting that he should refer anyone needing information to NBCA. Griffith undertook to try getting into personal touch with publishers to find out if the book had already been published; if not to consult a solicitor about writing a letter to publishers concerning the author's inaccuracies and suggesting publication was inadvisable (Family Planning Association Archives in the Wellcome Library, SA/FPA/A.5/2).

He did sport Fellowships of the Philosophical Society of England, the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Zoological Society, but these were all, at the date in question, open to any individual with a demonstrable interest in the subject, in the case of the Zoological Society provided they could obtain a proposer and seconder from among existing fellows.

However, these qualification were very probably sufficient to obtain him the entrée to the materials in 'Cupboard' in the British Museum Reading Room that would have been necessary for his endeavours. His obituary in the Central Somerset Gazette, 4 Feb 1955 mentions his 'intensive research (he spent hours in the British Museum)'*.

All this inclines me to scepticism. Maybe he was sounder on chickens?

*A further thought: I read somewhere - memory suggests it was a comment by the narrator in Hunter Davies' novel Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968) - that if you copy from one book it's plagiarism; if you copy from two or more, it's RESEARCH.

Childbirth, chronology and contributory causes

 An article in today's Guardian on recent shocking scandals over childbirth mentions the important influence of Grantly Dick Read on the rise of the concept of 'natural childbirth.

I would point out that while Glaser suggests that Dick Read drew on exoticised notions of the 'primitive' - although he later invoked very dubious ideas about 'African women' and how easily they gave birth (we think that organisations which have been working for decades on maternal health issues in various African countries such as vesico-vaginal fissure would be sceptical) - his initial legendary awakening that 'childbirth does not need to mean pain' actually occurred when he was a young medical student at the London Hospital, 'on the district' in Whitechapel, before the First World War. One night he was called out to a small, damp, and poorly lit room where he delivered a woman of her first child.She refused chloroform, and said after the child was born, ''It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to, was it Doctor?'". Dick Read's 'African Safari' took place much later in his career, 1953-4, after his period of practice in South Africa, 1948-53.

It was not until 1933 that he published his first work on the subject, Natural Childbirth. His teaching that women who knew what to expect when they went into labour, and who had been taught to relax, and thus did not not become tense and fearful, would be able to have a delivery without problems, did not, at that point, gain a great deal of traction. 

This was not perhaps surprising at a date when a successful labour was one which ended with mother and child both alive, while rates of maternal and infant mortality were still high enough to be matters of public concern. But when he published the updated and revised Revelation of Childbirth (1942)/ Childbirth without Fear (1944 in the USA) the advent of antibiotics - first sulphanomides in the mid-1930s, and then penicillin - had made a dramatic difference*, as had significant developments in blood transfusion technology. Thus basic survival was no longer the first concern, and the quality of the experience was available for consideration.

Also in the mix in the 1940s were the conditions under which women were giving birth: from the copious correspondence Dick Read began to receive - now preserved in the Wellcome Library, some it of published in Mary Thomas, Post-war mothers: childbirth letters to Grantly Dick-Read (1997) - these were far from optimum. Women wrote of being left alone in pain and fear, not knowing what was happening to them for hours: this must have been presumably at least partly due to pressure on resources under wartime/post-war/setting up of the NHS conditions. The concept of knowing what to expect, of having a strategy - breathing through the various stages - and a partner during birth was therefore very attractive.

One might also suggest that due to the discovery of the aetiology of rickets and the role of Vitamin D and sunlight, by the 1940s fewer women were likely to have pelvic deformities affecting labour from that cause.

It was, for its time, a revelation, but perhaps his theories should not have been taken up quite so much as a Universal Gospel.

(I am also given to raising my eyebrows when people describe 'natural childbirth' as being the offspring of 'second-wave feminism'. Dick Read was very far from being a feminist, what with the invocation of the simple primitive woman as the one who had not been corrupted by civilisation/education/listening to other women's horror stories into fear of childbirth, and the notion that, freed from that fear, women would be popping out babies liked whoah.)

*This had a similar impact on other attitudes: would Bowlby and Robertson's work on the need for parents to be with their childen in hospital been so acceptable at an earlier period, when the containment of infection was the prime concern?

International Women's Day

Nothing really new, but I've discovered that old posts I did for the Wellcome Library blog, 2008-2015, are still available courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

This is the one I did for IWD 2013: Paying attention to what women say:

International Women’s Day seems a good time to commemorate two amazing (and long-lived!) women doctors and researchers whose major breakthroughs were the result of listening to what women told them and paying attention to the implications.

Their work reflects not only their own achievements as women scientists, but a willingness to pay attention to and to value what women were telling them about their own experiences.

Another post with a bit more detail about the amazing Alice Stewart and her papers.