Abstrakt:
French enlightment came with new conceptions of physiological processes. It
included also a childbirth that was relieved of magic and irrationality. One of the products
of this ideology was populationism with its idea of the state organisation of health service.
Attention to a mother and a child created its basics. Medicine focused on pregnancy and
childbirth and it led to establishing of obstetrics as a special medical field. Later, gynaecology
and pediatry were emancipated. Although medicalisation of childbirth was not direct
and definite, medicine doctors took control over obstetrics in Europian countries from the
middle of 20th century.
Midwives were originally only a product of woman solidarity; it was institutionalized
because every society tried to protect a beginning human life. Therefore the midwives
became the first non-productive professional group that was reglemented by public authority.
Suzerain, municipal, parish authorities and also some forward-looking individuals
called for their competence during early modern times.
On July 24th 1753 Maria Theresia published General health order for the Bohemian
Kingdom that included the ordinance about the education and exams of midwives. In
1770 it was followed by such an order for all the monarchy which laid the fundamentals to
modern health service. After these orders precise instructions for midwives were published;
in the same time it was started with publishing of the textbooks for them. Some dozens of
them are preserved up to this day and they are an important source to the history of this
medical field and also to the history of this profession. We can reconstruct the genesis of
social position of midewives and settle the requirements that were imposed on their professional
ability and moral qualities. We can also use topographic and statistic manuals that
say us a lot about the rate of midewives in concrete regions and about their efficiency. Very
valuable but seldom preserved resources are also the booklets in which the midewives
wrote about the course of concrete childbirths. This article is based upon four such booklets
that come from Týn nad Vltavou, Choltice, Výpravy near Hradec Králové and Hořice
(1870s-1930s).
Current time has again rehabilited the personality of midewife. We can say that the
development of obstetrics in the industrial countries reminds a circle: from the monopoly of
midewife to the monopoly of medical doctor and from this one back again.
