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Social History of Medicine 2005 18(1):23-38; doi:10.1093/sochis/hki004
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Social History of Medicine Vol. 18 No. 1 © The Society for the Social History of Medicine 2005, all rights reserved.

‘The True Assistant to the Obstetrician’: State Regulation and the Legal Protection of Midwives in Nineteenth-Century Prussia

Arleen Marcia TuchmanAF1

AF1 Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, History Department, Box 1802-B, Nashville, TN 37235, USA. E-mail: arleen.m.tuchman{at}vanderbilt.edu

In recent years, historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European midwifery have drawn attention to the great differences between midwives' experiences in England and the United States, where obstetricians succeeded by and large in displacing female practitioners, and midwives' experiences on the continent, where their fate was far more varied. While some countries witnessed the decline of midwives, in many others they were licensed and integrated into a government-sanctioned medical hierarchy. Scholars have disagreed, however, on how to evaluate the government's role in regulating midwives. Some have been critical, portraying midwives as victims of an alliance between the State and elite physicians who sought to place all other practitioners under their control. Others have cast midwives as beneficiaries of the State's protectionist policies, emphasizing their success in withstanding physicians' attempts to eliminate them entirely. Whilst these different interpretative models may reflect some regional variations, this article suggests that, in many cases, midwives both lost and won simultaneously: as State employees they lost much of their independence, but in exchange they gained protection not only from elite physicians, but also from unlicensed practitioners, who posed every bit as much of a threat.

Keywords: State regulation


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