Abstract
This article examines the politics of midwifery and the persecution of untitled female assistants in childbirth in early republican Peru. A close reading of late colonial publications and the works of Benita Paulina Cadeau Fessel, a French obstetriz director of a midwifery school in Lima, demonstrates both trans-Atlantic and local influences in the campaign against untitled midwives. Cadeau Fessel's efforts to promote midwifery built upon debates among writers in Peru's enlightened press, who vilified untrained midwives' and wet nurses' vernacular medical knowledge and associated them with Lima's underclass. One cannot understand the transfer of French knowledge about professional midwifery to Peru without reference to the social, political, and cultural context.
Highlights
This article examines the politics of midwifery and the persecution of untitled female assistants in childbirth in early republican Peru
In her report to the protomédico of Peru in 1836, Benita Paulina Cadeau Fessel, the French director of Lima’s Maternity Hospital (Casa de la Maternidad) and the Midwifery School (Colegio de Partos), decried the persistence of ignorance about childbirth among the city’s traditional midwives, those responsible for assisting women in the process of giving birth. Claiming that her health was failing her and that she would soon have to resign from her position, Cadeau Fessel saw it as her duty to inform the highest medical authority in the republic of the mistakes and accidents that frequently occurred when complications arose in pregnancy or childbirth, or when “the woman in one of these two circumstances has the imprudence to entrust herself to people who lack training and are incapable in this profession, which is so difficult as well as dangerous”1 (Cadeau Fessel, 1836, p.3). This absence of appropriate training among most of the women who practiced as midwives in Lima, she argued, was only surpassed by the ignorance of the women in Peru’s countryside whose knowledge, in her view, imperiled the life of the mother and that of the fetus even more
Vernacular medical knowledge, as well as their fairly humble social status, such women constituted a clear threat to the fulfillment of one of the young nation’s clearest goals: the growth of its population
Summary
Between the foreign and the local: French midwifery, traditional practitioners, and vernacular medical knowledge about childbirth in Lima, Peru. Entre o estrangeiro e o local: obstetrizes francesas, médicos tradicionais e conhecimento médico vernáculo sobre partos em Lima, Peru
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