Midwifery Theory and Practice: (Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America 1600 to the Present)

Surveys important issues in the history of medicine Although there is substantial literature on childbirth, it typically lacks the full medical, historical, and social context that these volumes provide. This series fills the gap in many institutions' libraries by bringing together key articles on the expectant mother, the attendants of her delivery, and the health of the newborn infant. The articles are from British and American publications that focus upon childbirth practices over the past 300 years and are selected from both primary and secondary sources. Some are classic works in medical literature; others are from historical, sociological, anthropological and feminist literature that present a wider range of scholarly perspectives on childbirth issues. Charts the progress of childbirth, midwifery, and obstetrics The series provides readers with key primary sources that illuminate the history of childbirth, midwifery and obstetrics. For example, general historical texts note that childbed (puerperal) fever claimed hundreds of thousands of maternal lives, and provoked much fear in Britain and America. The articles in this series, in addition to historical facts, also provide discussion of the causes and consequences of particular fever cases taken from the medical literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and reveal what a challenge this disorder was to the medical profession. Includes more primary sources than other collections The articles serve as a resource for students and teachers in various fields including history, women's studies, human biology, sociology and anthropology. They also meet the educational needs of pre-medical and nursing students and aid pre-professional, allied health, and midwifery instructors in lesson preparations. The series examines a wide range of practical experience and offers a historical perspective on the most important developments in the history of British and American childbirth, midwifery, and obstetrics.

Table of Contents:
British Midwifery; The “Byrth of Mankynde.” (Its Author and Editions.); “These griping greefes and pinching pangs”: Attitudes to Childbirth in Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrones (1582); Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch; Elizabeth Cellier in 1688 on Envious Doctors and Heroic Midwives Ancient and Modern; The Perils of Early Modern Procreation: Childbirth with or without Fear? 1; Is Childbirth Any Place for a Woman? The Decline of Midwifery in Eighteenth-Century England; American Midwifery; “Childbirth-Travells” and “Spiritual Estates”: Anne Hutchinson and Colonial Boston, 1634-1638; “The Living Mother of a Living Child”: Midwifery and Mortality in Post-Revolutionary New England; Science Enters the Birthing Room: Obstetrics in America since the Eighteenth Century; Called to Her at Three O’Clock AM: Obstetrical Practice in Physician Case Notes; Midwifery; Obstetrics and the Work of Doctoring in the Mid-Nineteenthcentury American South; The Woman’s Experience of Childbirth on the Western Frontier; Bloodletting in American Obstetric Practice, 1800-1945; The Training and Practice of Midwives: A Wisconsin Study; The Immigrant Midwives of Lawrence: The Conflict between Law and Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Massachusetts; Mary Breckinridge, the Frontier Nursing Service and the Introduction of Nurse-Midwifery in the United States; Pregnancy and Parturition from a Woman’s Point of View; Pregnancy, Labor and Body Image in the United States; Forgotten Women: American Midwives at the Turn of the Twentieth Century; Working-Class Women, Middle-Class Women, and Models of Childbirth