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Midwifery in the Middle Ages


Midwifery in the Middle Ages was important to women's lives and health prior to the professionalization of medicine. During the Middle Ages in Western Europe, the medical knowledge and understanding that people relied on was from the Roman and Greek understanding of medicine, specifically Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristotle. These medical minds avoided women's health issues, specifically pregnancy because they believed that women handled women's issues; as William L. Minkowski explains, "men believed their dignity and self-esteem were diminished by the manual nature of care for the pregnant patient." Myriam Greilsammer notes that medieval "society's reluctance to let men deal with women is largely bound up with the taboos surrounding the 'secret' parts of their bodies," and the prevalence of this mindset allowed women to continue the art of midwifery throughout most of the Medieval era with little or no male influence on their affairs. Minkowski writes that in Guy de Chauliac's fourteenth-century work Chirurgia magna, "he wrote that he was unwilling to discourse on midwifery because the field was dominated by women." However, changing views of medicine would cause the women's role as midwife to be pushed aside as the professionalization of medical practitioners began to rise.

Most midwives came from the lower classes and were illiterate. Monica H. Green writes that "if midwives were literate, it seems to have been coincidental rather than a prerequisite of their work." Green notes that unlike "female surgeons and barbers... [midwives] do not seem to be regularly married to men in the medical trades." During the late Middle Ages a few books were written for teaching midwifery for both women and men. Prior to this point, midwife manuals were not written by practitioners or their teachers but by people who knew medical theory or outdated information.

Midwives learned their craft from other women and from having their own children. Minkowski writes that "without formal training, and because texts on midwifery were ancient and rare, midwives learned their skills as a craft from family or friends." From the time they were small girls, women who would later become midwives would have been present at the births of other siblings and would have been able to see what was done during the birthing process by the midwife or other female family members. Greilsammer writes that the midwife in Medieval art was "often portrayed in the act of setting out the instruments of her profession, the symbols of her qualifications – scissors, linens, a tray which she places in a box or wraps in a large basket, a birthing stool." Men were not allowed to view this birthing process. Greilsammer notes Belgian historian Louis Théo Maes' record of a fifteenth-century fine: "One Henne Vanden Damme, for having hid behind a staircase to eavesdrop upon his wife, she being in labour of childbirth, which thing doth not befit a man, for the said eavesdropping was fined 15 livres."


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