A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich tells the story of Martha Ballard; a midwife, healer, wife, mother, and eighteenth-century woman. In this book, the reader learns of this hardworking woman, the social web she lived in, and the workings of her town through personal accounts from the diarist and the author’s thorough analysis of them.
Martha is a diligent woman who makes good use of her connections with the rest of the female community. She keeps up-to-date accounts of how her patients are doing, even after treatment has stopped, showing her concern for others. She seems to love interaction based on detail of visitors to see her or her to see them rather than detail of why the visits actually take place. She also isn’t the one to gossip given her lack of little to no scandal mentioned within her diary.
As the title of the book implies, Martha was a midwife; attending 816 births in twenty-seven years. She was more than just that though. “In twentieth-century terms, she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife”(40); though in her time these distinctions in her services did not exist.
As a healer, Martha used remedies that “obviously rested on a long accumulation of English experience”(50), It would seem she borrowed from medical books of the time despite the fact that the diary holds no evidence that she so much as read one. It did, however, take note on how she took care of her family’s ills such as “her own husband’s sore throat”(40), as well as her neighbors. Of course, not all remedies would work out and some of her patients did die and prepared a few of their bodies for burial, such as the three “between August 3 and 24, 1787”(40).
There were other healers such as Martha who “move in and out of sickrooms unannounced”(61), but unlike the doctors that appeared, the women had no specific title stowed upon them. They were not considered professionals and practiced what is labeled as social medicine. These
Martha is a diligent woman who makes good use of her connections with the rest of the female community. She keeps up-to-date accounts of how her patients are doing, even after treatment has stopped, showing her concern for others. She seems to love interaction based on detail of visitors to see her or her to see them rather than detail of why the visits actually take place. She also isn’t the one to gossip given her lack of little to no scandal mentioned within her diary.
As the title of the book implies, Martha was a midwife; attending 816 births in twenty-seven years. She was more than just that though. “In twentieth-century terms, she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife”(40); though in her time these distinctions in her services did not exist.
As a healer, Martha used remedies that “obviously rested on a long accumulation of English experience”(50), It would seem she borrowed from medical books of the time despite the fact that the diary holds no evidence that she so much as read one. It did, however, take note on how she took care of her family’s ills such as “her own husband’s sore throat”(40), as well as her neighbors. Of course, not all remedies would work out and some of her patients did die and prepared a few of their bodies for burial, such as the three “between August 3 and 24, 1787”(40).
There were other healers such as Martha who “move in and out of sickrooms unannounced”(61), but unlike the doctors that appeared, the women had no specific title stowed upon them. They were not considered professionals and practiced what is labeled as social medicine. These