SUMMARY: Drawing on the admission records, the medical casebooks and the publications of its director, this article explores how the University of Göttingen's maternity hospital achieved its three official goals: teaching medical students, training female midwives, and providing shelter for needy parturient women. Since educating medical men was the most important aim of the hospital, the paper particularly focuses on how the demands of instruction shaped day-to-day obstetrical practices, especially under the directorship of Professor Friedrich Benjamin Osiander (1792--1822). He was a keen advocate of the forceps, whereas the first director, Professor Johann Georg Roederer (1751--63), had taken a moderate, that is a much less interventionist, approach to obstetrics. Osiander avowedly was determined to subordinate the parturient women to the demands of the clinic and to treat them as `living manikins'. In spite of that, there is evidence that the pregnant and parturient women, most of whom were unmarried and from the lower classes, made use of the lying-in hospital for their own purposes, and that sometimes they refused to play the role assigned to them. The link between the maternity hospital and the rise of the man-midwife and of `scientific' obstetrics appears to have been particularly strong in the case of Göttingen and other German university hospitals, compared with lying-in hospitals in other countries where the link was more indirect.
...More
Article
Schlumbohm, Jürgen;
(2007)
The Practice of Practical Education: Male Students and Female Apprentices in the Lying-In Hospital of Göttingen University, 1792--1815
(/isis/citation/CBB000773968/)
Article
Croxson, Bronwyn;
(2001)
The Foundation and Evolution of the Middlesex Hospital's Lying-In Service, 1745--86
(/isis/citation/CBB000770460/)
Article
Homei, Aya;
(2006)
Birth Attendants in Meiji Japan: The Rise of a Medical Birth Model and the New Division of Labour
(/isis/citation/CBB000770627/)
Thesis
Patterson, Amy Suzanne;
(1999)
“We ought not to be inactive spectators”: Physicians and Childbirth inAmerica, 1780--1840
(/isis/citation/CBB001562718/)
Article
Williams, Samantha;
(2011)
The Experience of Pregnancy and Childbirth for Unmarried Mothers in London, 1760--1866
(/isis/citation/CBB001231436/)
Article
Woods, Robert;
(2008)
Dr. Smellie's Prescriptions for Pregnant Women
(/isis/citation/CBB000774865/)
Article
Barreto, Maria Renilda Nery;
(2008)
Assistência ao nascimento na Bahia oitocentista
(/isis/citation/CBB000932902/)
Article
Nuttall, Alison;
(2006)
Passive Trust or Active Application: Changes in the Management of Difficult Childbirth and the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 1850--1890
(/isis/citation/CBB000773960/)
Article
Schlumbohm, Jürgen;
(2013)
Saving Mothers' and Children's Lives? The Performance of German Lying-in Hospitals in the Late-Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB001252855/)
Book
Kline, Wendy A.;
(2019)
Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth
(/isis/citation/CBB696013674/)
Article
Woods, Robert;
(2007)
Lying-in and Laying-out: Fetal Health and the Contribution of Midwifery
(/isis/citation/CBB000830250/)
Book
Banks, Amanda Carson;
(1999)
Birth chairs, midwives, and medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB000111130/)
Book
Schlumbohm, Jürgen;
(2012)
Lebendige Phantome: ein Entbindungshospital und seine Patientinnen 1751--1830
(/isis/citation/CBB001211084/)
Chapter
Keller, Hildegard Elisabeth;
Steinke, Hubert;
(2008)
Jakob Ruf's Trostbüchlein and De Conceptu (Zurich 1554): A Textbook for Midwives and Physicians
(/isis/citation/CBB000951693/)
Article
Cormack, Margaret;
(2012)
Introduction: Approaches to Childbirth in the Middle Ages
(/isis/citation/CBB001231399/)
Thesis
Kosmin, Jennifer F.;
(2010)
Protecting “The Body and Soul of Infinite Newborns”: Church and State in the Regulation of Midwifery in Tridentine Italy
(/isis/citation/CBB001562779/)
Article
Lallouette, Anne-Laure;
(2009)
Regards des médecins médiévaux sur la naissance
(/isis/citation/CBB000933276/)
Article
Cody, Lisa Forman;
(2004)
Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying-In Hospitals
(/isis/citation/CBB000630222/)
Article
King-Brassard, Rina;
Puljizevi, Kristina;
(2012)
Clandestine Birth: Care of Unwed Pregnant Women and Paturients within the Dubrovnik Foundling Hospital in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001200606/)
Article
Schlumbohm, Jürgen;
(2005)
Les limites du savoir: médecin et femmes enceintes à la maternité de l'université de Göttingen aux alentours de 1800
(/isis/citation/CBB000670610/)
Be the first to comment!