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Midwifery And Medicine In Britain: A Comparative View Of Midwifery And Childbearing In Scotland And England, 1650-1780, Summer Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I contend the female midwives and childbearing women did not passively accept the alteration of the experience of birth and the ideology surrounding it in eighteenth-century Britain. While the imposition of the man-midwife and the reframing of birth as a disease to be cured in some ways forced childbearing to shift to a medicalized event, many practices persisted from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, illustrating a vein of consistency in a seemingly tumultuous period. Furthermore, the changes that did take root were not solely the purview of the male medical community, but were influenced by women …