Dear Dr Bill ...Opinion: where the he** did you get the idea that midwives were all illiterates?
Sure, maybe in 1400 up to the mid-1700s many were but there are diaries and documentation from those years, by midwives that are held in private and ecclesiastical collections. Births had to be recorded and records kept! And most were stashed in the local monestary or church office.
The majority of midwives were certainly literate after the mid-1700s. They kept records and they billed their clients, in effect they ran a small business.
According to my great-aunt (who worked in medicine in early 1900s) midwives were used almost exclusively in hospitals in the mid 1800s to deliver babies and doctors were called in only when a C-section or the like was needed. And there were fewer C sections then, as midwives were so skilled in birthing! And a C section was considered a death sentance for the mother.
Things went along very well with midwives attending birth both in hospitals and at home.... until the doctors decided the women midwives were not capable.
Sorry to be abrupt but it was the propaganda by MDs that made women think a midwife wasn't a capable health provider.
In my opinion it was a matter of money.
There were medical practitioners who saw OB as an easy money maker as soon as women were having babies in hospitals -- after discovery of what caused childbed fever by Ignaz Semmeleweis -- before that, to best of my recollection, over 75 percent of women who had babies in hospitals died of "childbed fever" caused by dirty linen and doctors going direct from autopsies to examining patients with NO antiseptic procedure. They did not even wash their hands! How long did it take Lister and Semmeleweis to convince doctors that antiseptic procedures were a life and death matter? - YEARS!-
So,in tose days, fearing hospitals, women had babies at home.
Nowadays, with MDs so expensive there is a resurgence in midwifery. And now men are taking it up!
Money again!
Better read some history of midwifery, preferably written by women!
/end opinion
You really pushed my buttons on this one, Bill. Sorry for the rant ... no personal hostility intended ... this isn't the first time I've heard that statement and I just saw red!
