Paula A. Michaels. Lamaze

In 1951, the French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze traveled to the Soviet Union and witnessed a birth with psychoprophylactic techniques. Inspired, he returned to France to spread the word and then became an international apostle of the method. In this fascinating and judiciously argued work, Paula A. Michaels details not just Lamaze's initial conversion but also the political, social, and economic pressures that led to sometimes subtle, other times substantial, variations in what was considered “natural” childbirth as it moved from country to country and decade to decade. Michaels terms this study “an international history” and the source base and its impressive linguistic array back this assertion. American, British, French, and Russian archival sources are joined with periodicals as well as interviews, films, memoirs, feminist treatises, training manuals, and medical literature. The investigation starts with a history of the various, usually pharmacological, often controversial, methods of alleviating women's suffering as background to the development by 1930s British physician Grantly Dick-Read of the first psychological approach to managing labor, what he coined “natural childbirth.” Dick-Read, convinced that birth was a natural process akin to a bowel movement, believed that it was fear and tension in the cervix that produced pain in birth. In an argument framed by anxieties over racial degeneracy, Dick-Read proposed that pre-natal education and relaxation exercises would eliminate panic, reduce pain, and ultimately lead to higher birthrates.

Argument (complex analysis) · Memoir · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine