Weird Medical History · Medicine

The Family That Rang Bells and Blindfolded Mothers to Hide a Pair of Tongs

Two men struggle through the door of an English bedchamber carrying an enormous gilded box, as though it held a machine of terrifying complexity. Everyone else is sent out. The labouring woman is blindfolded. From behind the door, her family hears bells, clattering, strange noises. Inside the box are two curved metal spoons, hinged in the middle, about the size of salad tongs.

· 5 min read · Filed under Medicine

The Family That Rang Bells and Blindfolded Mothers to Hide a Pair of Tongs

What happened?

In 1569, a Huguenot barber-surgeon named William Chamberlen fled Catholic France with his wife and young son and landed at Southampton. A second son was born three years later. In a fit of naming economy that has confused historians ever since, both boys were called Peter — the elder and the younger.

Both became barber-surgeons and practised midwifery. Peter the elder served as accoucheur — male midwife — to Anne of Denmark, queen to James I, and landed in Newgate prison in 1612 for defying the College of Physicians.

Somewhere in this period, one of the brothers — the invention is traditionally credited to Peter the elder — made something genuinely new: a pair of hinged, spoon-shaped blades that could be slipped one at a time around a baby’s head and locked together, letting the operator pull gently while the mother pushed. The earliest firm documentary trace points to the next generation, Dr Peter Chamberlen (1601–1683), having it by around 1630.

Before this, when a labour obstructed, a surgeon’s instruments were hooks and perforators, used only after the baby had died, to save the mother. The Chamberlen blades could bring a living child out of a stalled labour. The family told no one. For roughly a century, across four or five generations, they simply called it “the secret.”

The concealment was theatrical. The Chamberlens arrived in closed carriages. The instrument travelled in a large, ornately carved box that reportedly took two people to carry — far bigger than its contents required, which was rather the point. Everyone else left the room. The mother was blindfolded and draped so she could not see the instrument even as it was used on her. Bells and clappers were sounded, by several accounts, to stop anyone listening at the door working out what was happening. Worth saying plainly: the deliberate secrecy is well documented, but the specific stage business comes from a tradition of retelling rather than any Chamberlen’s own account.

The secrecy had a price, and in 1670 it was paid in public. Hugh Chamberlen the elder went to Paris hoping to sell the secret to the French. François Mauriceau, the most respected obstetric authority in France, set him a test: a thirty-eight-year-old woman whose pelvis had been deformed by rickets, days into obstructed labour. Hugh failed. Mother and baby both died. He went home with the secret intact and a copy of Mauriceau’s textbook, which he translated in 1672 as The Accomplisht Midwife — mentioning in the preface that his family possessed a secret method, without saying what it was.

In 1688 Hugh left for Holland and sold instruments to a Dutch practitioner — by several accounts only one blade of the pair, useless alone. By the early 1700s the design had leaked anyway.

The family’s own forceps stayed where Dr Peter’s widow had left them. Woodham Mortimer Hall in Essex, bought by Chamberlen in 1638, passed out of the family in 1715. In 1813, someone lifted a trapdoor in the loft and found a hidden cache: several pairs of forceps — accounts differ on four or five — along with levers, fillets, hooks, and assorted family oddments. They passed to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1818, and are now held by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London.

Why was it strange?

Trade secrets are ordinary — recipes, dyes, glassmaking techniques. What makes this one strange is the arithmetic. This was not a better varnish. It was a tool that could deliver a living baby from a labour that would otherwise kill both mother and child, in an era when rickets was making deformed pelvises common and obstructed labour was a leading cause of death for women.

And it was hidden by men who were, by the standards of their day, reformers. Peter Chamberlen the third petitioned repeatedly to organise and train midwives, wrote against the death penalty for theft, and campaigned for public baths. The same family that argued publicly for better care for the poor kept the most useful obstetric instrument in Europe locked in a box.

What did scientists learn?

The design is elegant and was not obvious. Pulling on a baby’s head is dangerous; pulling on a cradle around the head spreads the force across the skull and jaw rather than concentrating it. The Chamberlen blades were separable, so each could be slid in individually along the curve of the birth canal and then locked — something no solid, one-piece instrument can do.

What the Chamberlens did not have was the second insight. Their blades had only a cephalic curve, matching the shape of the head. In the 1740s and 1750s André Levret in France and William Smellie in Britain added a pelvic curve — a second bend matching the arc of the birth canal — letting the instrument follow the path a baby actually travels. That improvement was published rather than hidden, and spread in years rather than generations.

How does it affect us today?

Forceps are still in use — one of the two main tools for assisted vaginal delivery, alongside the vacuum extractor, reached for when a labour stalls or the baby needs to be born quickly. The geometry Levret and Smellie settled on is still recognisable in the instrument on the tray.

The other legacy is about how medicine handles knowledge. The Chamberlen story is often taught as the opposite of 1923, when Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a dollar each. The comparison is a little unfair — there was no patent system a seventeenth-century surgeon could use, so publishing meant giving the work away — but the point survives. Withholding a technique doesn’t just delay its spread; it delays every improvement other people would have made to it.

If pregnancy or childbirth loss is something you’ve lived through, a GP, midwife, or a bereavement support organisation can help — you don’t have to sort through it alone.

Fun fact

Dr Peter Chamberlen, keeper of the family secret, attended the birth of the future Charles II in 1630 and was later physician to the King. He also founded, in 1651, the first known Seventh Day Baptist congregation in England — a man running a secret obstetric monopoly and a new religious movement at the same time.

Sources

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