First Midwife Essay

The term midwives has been around for over 200 years. The first midwife came about in the early sixteen hundreds. In the 1600’s midwife’s did not have to be licensed it was just women helping women got through the labor process. Men were not allowed in the birthing room which was usually their own bedroom because it was considered indecent. It wasn’t until 1716 that New York City required licensing for practicing midwives. This license would place the midwife into the role of a servant of the state or keeper of social and civil ordered. Death of the mother or child during childbirth back in those days was not uncommon and it was not accurately reported, but it was estimated that birth was still successful ninety percent of the time using a

William Shippen who was the first to teach formal training for midwives. Women at that time were not literate and could not afford school and the Puritan philosophy did not encourage the education for women. By the end of the 18th century most people assumed that midwives had no formal training, even though some did, and common existing beliefs held that women were intellectually and emotionally incapable of learning and applying the new OB methods. High society families came to believe that only physicians could provide the excellent care and female midwives could not provide the excellent care and that only physicians offered the best hope for a successful

Twilight sleep was introduced with the combination of morphine, for relief of pain, and scopolamine, and amnesiac that caused women to have no memories of the child birth process. The upper-class women initially welcomed it as a symbol of medical process, although its negative effects were later published. “Dr. Joseph Lee describes childbirth as a pathologic process that damages both mothers and babies “often and much.” He said that if birth were properly viewed as a destructive pathology rather than as a normal function, “the midwife would be impossible even of mention.” In the first issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, DeLee proposed a sequence of interventions designed to save women from the ‘evils natural to labor.” The interventions included routine use of sedatives, ether, episiotomies, and forceps. (Put Citation) As the years progressed more and more midwifery was not used in the middle and upper classes, the lower class was the ones that used midwifery the most because they could not afford to go to the hospital and pay them and a doctor to assist in childbirth. Midwifery began a slow uprising in the U.S. in the form of a Nurse-Midwife, when the Frontier Nursing Service was founded in a poor rural county in Kentucky in 1925. It was founded by Mary Breckinridge, who worked as a public health nurse for the Red Cross in France at the end of World