An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2022 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

15961 entries, 13944 authors and 1935 subjects. Updated: March 22, 2024

WILSON, Adrian

2 entries
  • 12022

The making of man-midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

"In England in the seventeenth century, childbirth was the province of women. The midwife ran the birth, helped by female "gossips"; men, including the doctors of the day, were excluded both from the delivery and from the subsequent month of lying-in. But in the eighteenth century there emerged a new practitioner: the "man-midwife" who acted in lieu of a midwife and delivered normal births. By the late eighteenth century, men-midwives had achieved a permanent place in the management of childbirth, especially in the most lucrative spheres of practice.

"Why did women desert the traditional midwife? How was it that a domain of female control and collective solidarity became instead a region of male medical practice? What had broken down the barrier that had formerly excluded the male practitioner from the management of birth?...Exploring the sociocultural dimensions of childbirth, Wilson argues with great skill that it was not the desires of medical men but the choices of mothers that summoned man-midwifery into being" (publisher).



Subjects: OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY › OBSTETRICS › History of Obstetrics, OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY › OBSTETRICS › Midwives, Social or Sociopolitical Histories of Medicine & the Life Sciences
  • 12023

Ritual and conflict: The social relations of childbirth in early modern England.

Abingdon, Oxford & New York: Ashgate, 2013.

"This book places childbirth in early-modern England within a wider network of social institutions and relationships. Starting with illegitimacy - the violation of the marital norm - it proceeds through marriage to the wider gender-order and so to the ’ceremony of childbirth’, the popular ritual through which women collectively controlled this, the pivotal event in their lives. Focussing on the seventeenth century, but ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this study offers a new viewpoint on such themes as the patriarchal family, the significance of illegitimacy, and the structuring of gender-relations in the period" (publisher).



Subjects: OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY › OBSTETRICS › History of Obstetrics, OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY › OBSTETRICS › Midwives, PEDIATRICS › History of Pediatrics, Social or Sociopolitical Histories of Medicine & the Life Sciences