Traditional Midwife Group Image Depiction And Social Culture Transition

This dissertation seeks to collect detailed depictions from history documents, including medical document and literature works, to reconstruct the life of an unimportant group, midwife, and trace the changing stereotypes of them as a group. Comparing the diversified personal image with the unified stereotype of midwife, the research tries to reflect contemporary attitudes towards midwife.To reconstruct the image of midwives more precisely, I approach this group from a long-run view, a period broadly defined as from Song dynasty to the early years of the Republic. In this dissertation, when discussing, two types of documents, medical book and literature works, are employed to examine the image of traditional midwife. Since midwife participates in childbirth, Chinese medicine practitioners also paid attention to midwives. In medical books from Song dynasty, Chinese medicine practitioners summarized their midwifery techniques, recognized traditional midwives as key role in the field of dystocia treatment, and also relies on them, In Ming dynasty, we still can find portrayals of skilled traditional midwife in medicine books. From Qing dynasty, however, Chinese medicine practitioners began to distrust midwife, so traditional midwives are described as nervous, troublesome figures in medicine books. In traditional literary works, traditional midwives are active in women’s social network as the other lower-class women in old China, who were called three kinds of nuns and six kinds of old women (sanguliupo). Ming and Qing literary works portray the image of the group more consistently. Among them, for example, images of clownish old ladies and poor, villainous infanticides are the most common. Even young women, who are often portrayed as beautiful ladies, still lived on abortion and thus negatively were depicted as misbehaviors. In personal diaries and documents, however, we can find a lot of helpful, experienced midwives, who were even called "Hell Bodhisattvas". It appears to be a contradiction between good personal images and bad midwife collective images. The contradiction is because although Chinese medicine practitioners use traditional midwife techniques, to the limitation of traditional medicine traditional midwife becomes the scapegoat of the dystocia. Modern public media, which advocated "science","healthcare", and identified traditional midwives as vicious killer brought midwives to the tragic situation. In the "modernization" process, traditional midwives represented an out-of-date image. Their occupational and behavioral characteristics were also portrayed as a negative example of feminine virtue. The shaping of traditional midwife image is stigmatized by the establishment orthodox cultural values, thus reflecting the social power of a cultural discourse.