BackStory

from the collections at harvard medical school backStory

For millennia, mediating childbirth was the province of women. As the original obstetricians—from the Latin, obstetrix, “midwife”—women routinely assisted other women in giving birth at home. “Man-midwives,” or accoucheurs, became fashionable in seventeenth-century France and, later, in England, particularly for difficult births. In England, the Chamberlen family gained fame for its secret method of successfully assisting obstructed births. That procedure, which remained closely guarded for nearly a century, involved a type of forceps invented by a member of that family in the early 1600s.

Later innovations included the use of chloroform as an anesthetic and the implementation of antiseptic and aseptic practices, essential for successful cesarean deliveries. Early cesarean deliveries often failed, however, because of poor surgical techniques or infection. Improved surgical procedures and more in-hospital births brought double-digit reductions in the maternal mortality rate, but it was the advent of antibiotics that drove the rate down more than 70 percent before the close of the 1940s. By this time midwifery, renamed obstetrics, was taught in medical schools, and the role of women as obstetricians was diminishing. —Susan Karcz

photo gallery

Medals from the collection of Horatio Robinson Storer hms.harvard.edu/harvard-medicine

LABOR INTENSIVE: Objects include, clockwise, from left, an information booklet for a Norlestrin Petipac, circa 1975, from the collection of John Rock, Class of 1918; a plaster Dickinson-Belskie birth model, one in a series of reproductive anatomy educational tools created for the 1939 World’s Fair; a Rythmeter, a calculator for the rhythm method of birth control, patented in 1947; and medals from the collection of Horatio Robinson Storer, Class of 1853, commemorating the pregnancy of Princess Elisabeth Christine of Bohemia in 1723 (left) and the birth of Princess Frederika of Prussia in 1770.

Medals courtesy of the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Rythmeter courtesy of the Harvard Medical Library in the Countway Library. Petipac and birth cast courtesy of the Warren Anatomical Museum in the Countway Library.