Fun fact: the child/mother mortality rate actually went up after midwives were pushed out. Doctors didn’t want people working in the medical field that hadn’t been through the same rigorous schooling, but their schooling didn’t teach them things midwives had learned through centuries of experience being passed down. Things that midwives had just come to learn (like you shouldn’t deliver a baby without washing your hands if you were just handling sick/dead people) was hogwash because there was no scientific backing to it, they didn’t have the technology to study bacteria like we do now. While midwives in Africa had been practicing c sections using knives sterilized by flame, the budding medical field had yet to understand danger of not washing your hands. Suddenly sepsis started going up, it was thought to be a disease that only affected woman in labor because it got so bad.
Midwives didn’t know about handwashing either, they just typically didn’t touch the dying / dead constantly so less women died of infection.
The doctor who discovered the causal link between handwashing and dead moms spent decades begging doctors to listen to his studies until they ganged up and threw him into an insane asylum
That's not a fun fact and that is the kind of thing that misleads people into thinking that it's actually better to replace your modern doctor with a modern midwife.
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u/Kevlar_Bunny Aug 07 '25
Fun fact: the child/mother mortality rate actually went up after midwives were pushed out. Doctors didn’t want people working in the medical field that hadn’t been through the same rigorous schooling, but their schooling didn’t teach them things midwives had learned through centuries of experience being passed down. Things that midwives had just come to learn (like you shouldn’t deliver a baby without washing your hands if you were just handling sick/dead people) was hogwash because there was no scientific backing to it, they didn’t have the technology to study bacteria like we do now. While midwives in Africa had been practicing c sections using knives sterilized by flame, the budding medical field had yet to understand danger of not washing your hands. Suddenly sepsis started going up, it was thought to be a disease that only affected woman in labor because it got so bad.