Sarah Stone (midwife)

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Sarah Stone was an English midwife and author who worked in the early 1700s. She urged better education for women who practiced midwifery and spoke out against the growing number of male midwives. She is seen as a champion of women and a follower of Enlightenment ideas.

Stone was born to the midwife Mrs. Holmes of Bridgewater and learned the trade as her mother’s apprentice for six years, finishing around 1702. Some sources say she began her own practice in Bridgewater around 1701, though some thought she was too young at the time. She married a surgeon-apothecary and had children; at least one daughter later became a midwife in 1726. Marrying a man with medical books may have helped her stay up to date and may have shaped her views about men entering the midwife trade.

From 1705 to 1720, Stone lived in Taunton, Somerset, where she was the most advanced obstetric caregiver in town because there were no male obstetric surgeons there. She handled many emergencies and, at her peak, was responsible for about 300 births a year. Most births went well, but some did not, and she faced difficult cases over her long career. She rarely used tools or instruments, using a knife only four times in about 35 years, and she relied on her own methods rather than the then-emerging practice of male midwives.

Health issues from the demanding work forced her to move to Bristol, where she faced more competition from other midwives and male practitioners but still earned recognition. Stone remained committed to the idea that women should run the practice of midwifery because women had done so for centuries.

In 1737 she published A Complete Practice of Midwifery, a guide for women in the field. It collected fifty challenging births to illustrate how to handle similar cases without male help. Stone argued that properly educated women did not need men to assist in childbirth and that men often lacked understanding of the female birthing experience.

After publishing the treatise, Stone moved to London and then disappears from the public record; her exact death date is unknown, though she was known to be alive in 1737.

Stone is remembered as an important early figure in English midwifery, standing up for women’s work and contributing a practical manual that helped other women in the field.