Date of Award
1-1-2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in History
First Advisor
Jeffrey R. Watt
Second Advisor
Marc Lerner
Third Advisor
Isaac Stephens
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
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 who found their own ways to operate within and shape the male-dominated sphere of medicalized birth. By refocusing the center of a British study on Scotland we are able to interrogate this shift in midwifery at its core, in the medical epicenter of Edinburgh. This change in geographic focus also expands our understanding across space, but also time as we explore links between the eighteenth-century shift from ritual to disease and the impact of that shift on modern birth practices in Britain and America.
Recommended Citation
Smith, Summer, "MIDWIFERY AND MEDICINE IN BRITAIN: A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF MIDWIFERY AND CHILDBEARING IN SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND, 1650-1780" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2135.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2135