Frontier nurse-midwives and antepartum emergencies, 1925 to 1939

This article examines how the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) utilized nurse-midwives to respond to antepartum emergencies such as preterm birth, eclampsia, malpresentation, and hemorrhage in the women of Appalachia in the years 1925 to 1939. Particular attention is given to the preparation that nurse-midwives received during their midwifery education to prevent and respond to emergencies. Using traditional historical research methods and primary source material from the FNS papers in the Special Collections, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington, Kentucky, this article describes the nurse-midwives' experiences and how they implemented skills they had learned during their training in Great Britain. Working in the isolated mountainous area of Leslie County, Kentucky-for the most part without direct assistance from physicians-FNS nurse-midwives decreased maternal and neonatal mortality rates. During their first 2000 births, they had only 2 maternal deaths, whereas the national average maternal mortality rate was approximately 7 deaths per 1000 births. The nurse-midwives performed external cephalic versions on a routine basis. For pregnancy and birth emergencies, they administered sedation, gave general anesthesia, and performed invasive lifesaving techniques in order to protect the lives of the women in their care. During these 14 years, their cross-cultural engagement, assessment skills, clinical judgment, and timely interventions improved maternal and child health throughout the region.

Communicating a New Consciousness: Countercultural Print and the Home Birth Movement in the 1970s

This essay analyzes the production of three influential home birth texts of the 1970s written by self-proclaimed lay midwives that helped to fuel and sustain a movement in alternative birth practices. As part of a countercultural lifestyle print culture, early "how-to" books (Raven Lang's The Birth Book, Ina May Gaskin's Spiritual Midwifery) provided readers with vivid images and accounts in stark contrast to those of the sterile hospital delivery room. By the end of the decade, Rahima Baldwin's more mainstream guidebook, Special Delivery, indicated an interest in translating home birth to a wider audience who did not necessarily identify as "countercultural." Lay midwives who were authors of radical print texts in the 1970s played an important role in reshaping expectations about the birth experience, suggesting a need to rethink how we define the counterculture and its legacies.

[PROF. BESIM OMER PASHAS VIEWS ON POPULATION POLICIES DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TURKISH REPUBLIC]

Dr. Besim Ömer Akalin, was a pioneer in modern obstetric and neonatal practices, and the founder of the first maternity hospital in Turkey. He established nursing as profession and promoted the development of modern midwifery. Besim Omer Pasha was also ins- trumental in the organization of the Turkish Red Crescent, the Institute for Protection of Children, and the Society for Tuberculosis Control. Professor Besim Omer Akalin chai- red the gynecology and obstetric clinics of the Medical Faculty, and was elected Rector of the Istanbul University. He also served as General Director of Health, and was a Member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in his later years. Together with his textbooks and treatises, Besim Ömer Akalin published booklets for the public where he addressed a wide range of topics on social health, hygiene and welfare.

Reading and Hearing The Womans Booke in Early Modern England

This essay takes seriously Thomas Raynalde's advice in The Womans Booke that women might read this work aloud. The evidence I use to sketch the scene of reading includes Raynalde's advice to readers in his long prologue, and also the kind of reading practice that his own writing represents. But I also go outside the text, considering what we know about the experience of listening to a book, and emphasizing the link between this practice and rhetorical education. I also examine the evidence left behind by two male readers: William Ward, who marked his copy of the 1565 edition privately, and Edward Poeton of Petworth, who represented instead a semipublic or shared reading: the evaluation of The Womans Booke and other books of generation by a Midwife and her Deputy in a fictional dialogue "The Midwives Deputie" (ca. 1630s).

Between the foreign and the local: French midwifery, traditional practitioners, and vernacular medical knowledge about childbirth in Lima, Peru

This article examines the politics of midwifery and the persecution of untitled female assistants in childbirth in early republican Peru. A close reading of late colonial publications and the works of Benita Paulina Cadeau Fessel, a French obstetriz director of a midwifery school in Lima, demonstrates both trans-Atlantic and local influences in the campaign against untitled midwives. Cadeau Fessel's efforts to promote midwifery built upon debates among writers in Peru's enlightened press, who vilified untrained midwives' and wet nurses' vernacular medical knowledge and associated them with Lima's underclass. One cannot understand the transfer of French knowledge about professional midwifery to Peru without reference to the social, political, and cultural context.

[Midwives in Brod na Savi (Croatia) in 19th century]

The development of population policy and health legislation as a result of government, the need for more young, healthy, working and military active population, resulted in the education of all health workers including midwives, legal regulation of their work, increasing their number and training of midwifery profession. With the development of this profession conditions of women giving birth, pregnancy and birth control were gradually improved, and thus influenced the birth rate and mortality of the population and the natural growth. On the example of the town of Brod na Savi one can see that it was time-consuming and controlled development of the midwifery profession in the region, which have affected the poor socio-economic conditions, poor climatic conditions, and the presence of the border and the consequent large-scale migration of the population. It is important to note that the foundations for population policies and the observed midwifery profession enabled the development of the same in the coming period.

"By expresse experiment": the doubting midwife Salome in late medieval England

This article examines late medieval English representations of the startling and apocryphal story of Salome, the skeptical midwife who dares to touch, or at least attempt to touch, the Virgin Mary "in sexu secreto" during a postpartum examination at the nativity. Salome's story originated in the second century, but its late medieval iterations are inflected by a culture interested in evaluating and examining sensory evidence, in both medicine and religion. The story appears in sermon collections, devotional texts, the cycle nativity plays, and John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady, and these variations demonstrate the intersection of gender and experience-based knowledge in medical and devotional contexts. Salome's story provides a unique opportunity to study late medieval interpretations of female medicine, materialism, and spirituality.

Breaking new ground

The most significant change during Jenny Leggott's long nursing career relates to the increasing complexity of patients' conditions, she believes. Patients with multiple comorbidities are surviving longer, which means there are now older people in hospital with high levels of need.

Choosing the best

Four exceptional nurses, four uplifting stories and a difficult decision: your challenge is to decide which of the outstanding quartet will be the winner of this year's Patient's Choice award. You can vote by phone or text, or by visiting www.patients-choice.co.uk between now and April 25.