Abstract
In a groundbreaking study of the New England midwife Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich characterized health care in the Early Republic for its “dominant eclecticism,” with a variety of roles that included female midwife and healer as well as male physician.1 Not just a companion to a woman’s process of labor and delivery, the midwife might also provide care in acute illness as well as end-of-life palliative care for men, women, and children. As Emily Abel has recently argued, in rural nineteenth-century America, distance and the swiftness of death from trauma and acute illness often prevented the attendance of a physician. Moreover, midwives in this period were the recipients of both communal lore and direct observation (including postmortem autopsies) before working independently, although the term “independently” does not do justice to the fundamentally social nature of their work. This knowledge included a general familiarity with human anatomy, diagnosis, and botanical or other remedies.2
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© 2016 Thomas Lawrence Long
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Long, T.L. (2016). The Midwife’s Calling: Martha Ballard’s Diary and the Empire of Medical Knowledge in the Early Republic. In: Balkun, M.M., Imbarrato, S.C. (eds) Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_6
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