Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site unc.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!mcnc!unc!cm From: cm@unc.UUCP (Chuck Mosher) Newsgroups: net.med Subject: Midwives / Infant Mortality Message-ID: <490@unc.UUCP> Date: Tue, 25-Jun-85 15:35:51 EDT Article-I.D.: unc.490 Posted: Tue Jun 25 15:35:51 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 27-Jun-85 06:44:31 EDT Organization: CS Dept., U. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill Lines: 40 I was going to respond by mail to the physician who countered my request for more midwives by touting statisitics on infant/mother mortality but I lost the article, so ya'll have to suffer through (but it will be good for you!). The following is quoted from the book _Safe Alternatives in Childbirth_, published by NAPSAC (National Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth), 1976. It is actually a collection of papers given at a conference. The title of the article I am quoting from is "Childbirth Alternatives and Infant Outcome: A Pediatric View" by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD, ACHO. He is a Professor in the Dept of Preventative Medicine at U of I, and Vice President of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Thru Nutrition. It is a great article and I would like to copy it all, but I will include only that section that deals with the subject at hand. "Do doctors deserve the credit for the fall in infant mortality over the past 70-80 years? Or perhaps, infant mortality was very low centuries ago when midwives delivered babies at home. When the female healer, including the midwife, was eliminated through the witch hunts of the 17th and 18th centuries, male doctors took over. They had one characteristic that midwives did not possess -- i.e. they performed autopsies. And they had a nasty habit of going from the autopsy table to the mother in labor without washing their hands or, judging from old pictures, without even changing their bloody gowns. Is it any wonder that childbirth fever -- puerperal sepsis -- became the greatest killer of the times? Finally, of course, toward the end of the 19th century, Ignacz Semmelweiss told the doctors "wash your hands, you damn fools," for which his final reward was incarceration in an insane asylum. And, as the male doctors began to wash their hands, childbirth fever began to disappear. Now, my concern is that modern medicine has taken credit for the decline in infant mortality, but understandably enough, has never considered assuming blame for its previous rise." It may also interest everyone to note that the Netherlands has one of the lowest (if not the lowest) infant and maternal mortality rates in the world. No, the US in not in second place, it is somewhere around 15th! In the Netherlands almost all births take place at home, attended by midwives.