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Meeting February 08
An unusual title drew a large audience to our February meeting to hear Sylvia Vida, a senior
midwife and tutor at a Leeds hosptal, give a very interesting talk about the history of midwifery.
Her interest in the subject was sparked by being given an old book about it by a shopkeeper in
Earby.
For many years, the "midwife" was the lady in the community who "knew what to do" at the
appropriate time, but whose "training" came from watching others. A very informal code of conduct was drawn up at the start of the 17th century, but it was only after a general outcry about standards that formal training and diploma courses were set up in the 1870's. There had been increasing concern as the population grew in the 19th century about unnecessary stillbirths, miscarriages,
and the killing or "farming" of unwanted children to foster parents, which was shown in satirical
cartoons at the time or in literary characters such as Mrs Sarah Gamp in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewick.
Standards improved very quickly, but Sylvia stated how midwifery has always been considered a
"cinderella" profession and the first to suffer, as it is even now, from threatened financial cuts. |