The Growth of Medical Authority

Technology and Morals in Turn-of-the-Century Obstetrics

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2478015
AutoresJudith Walzer Leavitt (University of Wisconsin–Madison, autor de correspondencia)
Año1987
Volumen1
Número3
Páginas230-255
Fecha de publicación1987-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMedical Anthropology Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0745-5194 • E-ISSN: 1548-1387
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/maq.1987.1.3.02a00020
OpenAlexW1980081684
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas24

Before 1880 birthing women and their female attendants dominated decisions concerning labor and delivery. Between about 1880 and 1920, however, the medical profession gained control of obstetrical care, and birth increasingly took place within hospitals. Using the specific example of the debate about performing craniotomies (the surgical mutilation of the fetal head to permit vaginal extraction) on live fetuses, the paper analyzes how technological innovations, changing medical theory, moral and ethical considerations, and professional interests interacted to make physicians more powerful arbiters in America's birthing rooms. Decisions surrounding cases of cephalopelvic disproportion, when major surgical interventions became essential, reveal most starkly the issue of control. Physicians learned to use such situations to increase the importance of what they felt was the uniquely scientific basis of their own contribution. The establishment of physicians' authority over emergency home-based deliveries in this turn-of-the-century period was a necessary prerequisite to their ultimate assumption of hospital-based authority

Cephalopelvic disproportion · Control (management · Economics · Management · Medical education · Medical profession · Political science · Pregnancy · Psychological intervention · Public relations · Sociology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Medical History and Innovations · Medicine · Nursing