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Session 7: The Development of midwifery practice

 

Session 7: The Development of midwifery practice


Session Outline

This session will offer students an opportunity to survey the professionalisation and medicalisation of midwives, and to consider how midwifery practices altered/developed through the process.  We will first investigate how, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was increasingly viewed that midwifery should belong to medicine, and how, by the late twentieth century, midwifery was performed mostly in the medical institution of the hospital.  We will probe how this process paralleled with the (de-)professionalization of midwives, and in so doing, we also consider the development of ‘neighbouring' medical professions - namely obstetrics, gynaecology, paediatrics and nursing - as a factor that left a significant impact on the practice of midwifery.


Session leaders

Janette Allotey

Aya Homei


Aims

  • - To survey the process by which midwifery became increasingly part of medicine
  • - To offer an insight into the ways in which the change in the midwifery practice was influenced also by the development of other medical professions
  • - To critically review the historiography on the professionalisation of midwives

Content of the session

  • - The process by which midwives were integrated with, or excluded from, the medical practice of midwifery
  • - The emergence of lying-in hospitals in the eighteenth-century and the change in the midwifery practice
  • - Developments in obstetrics, gynaecology, paediatrics and nursing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their influence on midwifery practice as well as the professional development of midwives

Teaching methods to be used

Lecture, pre-reading, tutorials and seminar presentations

Indicative Reading

Arney, William Ray Power and the Profession of Obstetrics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Beier, Lucinda McCray ‘Expertise and Control: Childbearing in Three Twentieth-Century Working-Class Lancashire Communities', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78 (2), 2004, pp. 379-409.

Borst, Charlotte G. Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Donegan, Jane Women and Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality and Misogyny in Early America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978).

Donnison, Jean Midwives and Medical Men: A History of Inter-Professional Rivalries and Women's Rights (London: Heinemann, 1977).

Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973).

Harley, David ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch', Social History of Medicine, 3 (1), 1990, pp. 1-26.

Leavitt, Judith Walzer Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Leap, Nicky and Billie Hunter The Midwife's Tale: An Oral History from Handywomen to Professional Midwife (London: Scarlet Press, 1993).

Litoff, Judy Barrett American Midwives: 1860 to the Present (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978).

Marland, Hilary and Anne Marie Rafferty (eds.) Midwives, Society and Childbirth: Debates and Controversies in the Modern period (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

Moscucci, Ornella The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

McGregor, Deborah Kuhn From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

Nuttal, Alison ‘A Preliminary Survey of Midwifery Training in Edinburgh, 1844 to 1870', International History of Nursing Journal, 4 (2), 1998-1999, pp. 4-14.

Shorter, Edward ‘The Management of Normal Deliveries and the Generation of William Hunter,' in B. F. Bynum & Roy Porter (eds.) William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1985), pp. 371-384.

McIntosh, Tania ‘Profession, Skill or Domestic Duty? Midwifery in Sheffield, 1881-1936,' Social History of Medicine, 11 (3), 1998, pp. 403-20.

Versluysen, Margaret Connor ‘Midwives, Medical Men and "Poor Women Labouring of Child": Lying-In Hospitals in Eighteenth-Century London', in Helen Roberts (ed.) Women, Health and Reproduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 18-49.

Wertz, Richard W. and Dorothy C. Wertz Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America, Expanded Edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).