Usurping
"Clinical
Material"
The Major Motive for the
Elimination
of Midwives
by Medical Politicans
Ø "I should like to emphasize what may be called the negative side of the midwife. Dr. Edgar states that the teaching material in NY is taxed to the utmost. The 50,000 cases delivered by midwives are not available for this purpose. Might not this wealth of material, 50,000 cases in NY, be gradually utilized to train physicians?" [1911-D, p 216] ^25
Ø "No one can read these figures without admitting that the situation is deplorable, and that the vast majority of our schools are not prepared to give the proper clinical instruction to anything like the present number of students. .... The paucity of material (i.e. teaching cases) renders it probable that years may elapse before certain complications of pregnancy and labor will be observed ... to the great detriment of the student. Moreover, such restriction in material greatly hampers the development of the professor and his assistants by the absence of suggestive problems and his inability to subject his own ideas to the test of experience.” 1911-B; WilliamsMD p.171 ^26
Ø "Another very pertinent objection to the midwife is that she has charge of 50 percent of all the obstetrical material [teaching cases] of the country, without contributing anything to our knowledge of the subject. As we shall point out, a large percentage of the cases are indispensable to the proper training of physicians and nurses in this important branch of medicine. .”[1912-B, p.224] ^27
Ø "It is at present impossible to secure cases sufficient for the proper training of physicians in obstetrics, since 75 percent of the material [i.e.. childbearing mothers] otherwise available for clinical purposes is utilized in providing a livelihood for midwives. If schools for midwives were established in al the larger cities of the country a large number of additional cases would become necessary for training the midwives and we should soon find ourselves in the anomalous position of favoring the elimination of the physicians from the practice of obstetrics, by still further depriving them of clinical material for their training, in order to provide trained midwives to supplant them". [1912-B, p.225] ^28
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