From the "Art of cutting the umbilical cord" by Dr. J.B. Lalangue to the "Midwifery" by Prof.Dr. A. Lobmayer and Prof.Dr. F.Durst

A short survey of midwifery and obstetrics development in the northwest part of Croatia is presented in this paper, from J.B. Lalangue's coming to VaraŽdin, through the founding and work of Midwifery School and National Maternity in Zagreb to the persons without whom this would not be possible or it would be quite different. Lalangue, being an expert on obstetrics, noticed in a very short period of time, all misfortune caused by incompetent work of then's midwives, so he published the book "Brevis institutio de re obstetritia illiti kratek navuk od mestrie pupkorezne⃛", and started first midwifery courses for peasant women. Focus of this paper is on Prof. Dr Antun Lobmayer textbook analyses, and he was the first professor of midwifery, and the director of the "Royal Midwifery School" and the "National Maternity" in Zagreb. Textbooks for midwives named "Midwifery- Learning Book for Midwives', had six editions over 50 years and they represent the basis of Croatian midwifery textbook literature. Prof. Dr Franjo Durst, the assistant and successor of Prof. Lobmayer completed and partially revised the last two editions.Besides the biographies of the "rdquor;Midwifery School" professors, an analyssis and critical review on the mentioned textbooks is given from today' s medicine point of view.

"A midwife at every confinement": Midwifery and Medicalized Childbirth in Ontario and Britain, 1920-1950

This paper compares midwifery in Ontario and Britain in the first half of the 20th century. British midwives improved maternal and infant health and welfare by making childbirth a cooperative, medically managed event in conjunction with physicians. British midwives thus participated in, and contributed to, developments in obstetrics. In contrast, Ontario physicians worked to exclude midwives from participation in the modernization of birth management, relying on a narrower concept of "medicalization" defined as physician dominance. This study challenges the medical profession's assumptions that the exclusion of midwifery in Ontario was necessary to the medicalization of childbirth. The British alternative, where midwives were seen as partners rather than obstacles, illustrates that medicalization in the interest of infant and maternal safety could be integrated with the work of midwives.

"It's been a long road to acceptance": midwives in Rhode Island, 1970-2000

A resurgence of midwifery came to Rhode Island in the 1970s. Midwives acted as modern health care professionals to conserve a traditional woman-centered birth, but the battle was long and arduous, from Dr. Ellen Stone attempting to eliminate midwives in the state in 1912 to doctors using the death of 2 home birth infants in the 1980s to undermine the growing presence of professional nurse-midwives in the state. Midwives prevailed when the state legislature passed measures in 1988 and 1990 increasing the power and authority of midwives, and when a federal grant in 1993 allowed the University of Rhode Island to open the first training program for nurse-midwives in the state.

Charting the history of midwifery education

Despite the recent popularity of exploring the history of midwifery practice, there has been minimal attention paid to the history of midwifery education. The purpose of this paper is to display a visual map and timeline of midwifery education from the eighteenth century, when formal midwifery programmes were introduced, to the present day. The paper will be inclusive of the history of midwifery teaching through the use of the High Coombe College archives (Lorentzon et al 2008). Prior to the eighteenth century, processes for learning midwifery were informal and unregulated. Traditional apprenticeships were gradually replaced by formal, regulated educational midwifery programmes, which were assessed. Midwifery teacher training finally became established in the twentieth century.

Saving mothers' and children's lives?: the performance of German lying-in hospitals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Medical men, turning to midwifery in the eighteenth century, claimed that they were able to save the lives of mothers and children, jeopardized by "ignorant" midwives. Consequentially, modern scholars have tried to assess the progress of obstetrics and the merits of lying-in hospitals on the basis of maternal and, more rarely, perinatal mortality rates. The data and methodological problems involved, however, have been largely ignored. Here they are discussed in the light of a micro-study based on detailed archival evidence from Göttingen University's lying-in hospital, founded in 1751. Its mortality data are analyzed in comparison to those from other German and some foreign maternity hospitals. In a further step, perinatal and maternal mortality in hospitals is compared to that in normal home deliveries, attended by female midwives. By linking the findings to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about the pros and cons of lying-in hospitals, further questions are raised.