The history of the medical and nursing care given to parturient women has been approached in a number of ways. Early studies largely equated it with the development of obstetric technology that occurred from the early eighteenth century onwards, focusing on its potential to save maternal and foetal life, but without examining closely the frequency and significance of its actual use. Thereafter, feminist historians re-interpreted similar evidence to stress what they regarded as the degrading and invasive aspects of such technology, especially as it related to the increasing use of chloroform anaesthesia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Interest then moved from the technology itself, to its effects on other aspects of care in childbirth, particularly on the eighteenth-century decline of the traditional midwife and the concomitant rise of the man-midwife.