Ninteenth-century midwifery case studies from Britain and New Brunswick: Tradition in transition

Concurrent with renewed interest in midwife-assisted childbirth, the history of early modern and modern midwifery has become an important topic of scholarly debate and the especial interest of many historians. As an addition to the reclamation of traditional midwife history, this thesis illustrates that midwives continued their traditional forms of practice throughout the nineteenth century in Canada as in England, amid increasing physician interest in normal childbirth attendance. Reinvestigating and reinterpreting professional and community midwife roles, the second chapter takes a close look at an individual Coventry midwife, Mary Eaves, whose hand-written journal, lying largely untouched in the Coventry Archives, provides evidence of a midwifery career that spanned decades (1847-1875). Following the study of Eaves, my third chapter charts a collective profile of midwifery practice in New Brunswick, Canada, during and beyond the decades of Eaves' British practice. Collectively these studies show that midwives continued to be important childbirth attendants and their on-going practice stands as evidence of resistance to increased pressures from organized male-dominated medicine to relinquish their traditional role. These complementary studies in England and New Brunswick suggest that long-acceptable forms of midwifery practice became a target for scientific, professionalized medicine, one midwives were ill-equipped to deflect given the nineteenth-century cultural milieu.