A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Author:Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307772985
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-22T10:00:00+00:00

During the first two years at the new farm, Martha was repeatedly ill, her old problems perhaps accentuated by the hard work of making a new garden and reestablishing domestic order. When the family had moved from the mills in 1791, she had had the help of her girls. Now, she was left to struggle alone and offer what help she could to Sally, who was often pregnant. “God grant me strength to bear my toil and affliction.” The prayer was repeated over and over, and eventually God, or Ephraim, heard. On November 28, 1800, when she was doubled over with a fit of “colic,” he got out of bed, made her some tea, and warmed a brick for her stomach.

Martha’s descriptions of her own illnesses are opaque, yet it is clear that some of her problems were gynecological. She had long since passed menopause, perhaps before the diary opened, but in the early years at the farm she was troubled by recurrent vaginal bleeding, a problem that had begun just before the move. On June 8, 1799, she had written, “I found myself to be after the manner of woman.” In 1806, she added in the margin of that entry, “I have remained in that situation every [month?] since.” She had another unexplained “infirmity” (perhaps hemorrhoids or a prolapsed uterus) that sometimes made it difficult for her to sit in a chair.26 The colic also continued to trouble her. During one attack in October 1801 she “had a humour come out on my skin which was very tedious to bear. They gave me a decoction of snake root & saffron.” She finally sent for Dr. Hubbard, who came on October 15 and “gave some prescriptions but his opinion is that it is not provible I Ever shall injoy a good state of health again.” She pondered the prognosis for the next few days, keeping to her bed most of the time. On October 20, she was up picking wool, gathering hollyhock seed, and cutting broomcorn. On November 8, she stayed up all night attending a woman in labor.

Her midwifery practice had passed its peak, however. Deliveries dropped from fifty-one in 1799, the last year at the Howard farm, to twenty-six in 1800. By 1802, she was down to eleven deliveries a year. Poor health was one problem. (She recorded twenty-one days of illness in 1800, seventy-five by 1802.) The location of the new house was another. Jonathan’s farm stood on a broad plateau in an isolated neighborhood high above the river. The road from the meeting house was breathtakingly steep, enough to keep Martha away from church and the stores except when the weather was especially pleasant and her health good.

One of her brief pleasures during this period was the arrival of Dorothy and Stephen Barton, who had returned to Maine after ten years in Oxford. They lived for a while in the center of Augusta before moving to a farm in Malta (now Windsor, Maine). “I have not

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