

librio-phile, amateur medical historian, collecting my memories and your stories
Still, by formalizing and rationalizing knowledge about pregnancy and birth, and barring women from entrance to medical school, the medical establishment effectively discredited (and in some cases rendered obsolete) the accumulated folk wisdom women had been gathering for hundreds of years. In marginalizing women’s direct experience of birth, much is lost. The contemporary natural birth m…
…irth resulted from the growth of the field of gynecology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The American Medical Association, founded in 1847, was largely an effort to professionalize the field of medicine and standardize its practices, and the ongoing work of midwives like Onnie Lee Logan posed a direct challenge to formalization, and sowed, in Bonaparte’s words, “inter-occupational conflict.”
…wives of the South in particular — were repositories of knowledge that the state sought to control. Much has been made recently of the notion that women with expertise in healing practices have historically been persecuted. This awareness first peaked in the 1970s, as Second Wave feminists were learning about the ways female healers had been maligned, marginalized, and outright abused by the medical establishment. In 1975, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English published their study Witches, Midwives, Nurses: A History of Women Healers. In it, they trace a centuries-long tradition of women in medicine, writing, “They were abortionist…