Silent Sisterhood by Patricia Branca

Author:Patricia Branca [Branca, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Modern, 19th Century, Reference, General
ISBN: 9781136243073
Google: h1gewYbZbrQC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-06-26T15:56:20+00:00

uncleanliness of the midwives who attended them. It seems quite probable that conversion from midwife to doctor may have heightened the risk for many middle-class women, particularly if we assume that the midwives previously employed by the middle-class, the better-paid group, were likely to have some sense of personal cleanliness. Certainly widespread conversion to doctors had no impact on the per capita incidence of puerperal fever through the 1890s. The simple fact was, as Semmelweis' data suggested, that a doctor came into contact with a wider variety of infectious diseases in his practice than did a midwife. Whereas the midwife's practice was confined to maternity cases, the doctor brought to his patient new hazards. He could and did carry to the parturient woman laudable pus from his surgical cases, droplets from scarlet fever cases and putrefaction from the corpses he dissected. The irony of the situation is dramatic. The middle-class woman sought the services of the doctor in order to provide the best measures for her own health and that of the child, and by doing so, she left herself a victim to the largest cause of maternal mortality, puerperal fever.

Thus it can be seen that the woman's anxieties about her condition were realistic. Her fears about the pains of childbirth and possible death were not greatly alleviated in the nineteenth century, although they could have been had the British medical profession not been so slow to recognize the real needs of women. This reluctance to change owed much to a general traditionalism but it also reflected the medical profession's prejudices about women. The general consensus of opinion by doctors was that women were by nature emotional beings, subject to nervous disorders. This in turn prompted an overemphasis on the emotional aspects of a woman's life, when in reality there should have been more concentration on her physical state. The downgrading of physical changes and the stress on emotional aspects colored discussions of the management of pregnancy. Ignorance accounts for part of this. Unable to explain the physical phenomena, doctors argued them away with references to the 'typical' emotional behavioral problems of women. And the doctors were not shy in informing the general public of the primacy of the emotions. Dr Conquest stressed that

. . . there is another aspect of most material consequence to the health of the female . . . I mean the due regulation of her mental constitution, and her moral feelings and affections . . . To what use is it carefully to observe the external and physical laws of health, if in herself she raises an agent more powerful to subvert her health than they are to preserve it? The influence of strong or violent mental emotion, whether exciting — as of joy, hope, anger, or rage; or depressing - as of fear and despair, we well know to surpress a powerful and immediate influence over the vital functions. Death has often followed instantaneously . . .53

A woman's emotions were not only responsible for her disabilities but also affected the child's health.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.