Wendy Kline, Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth.

Abstract

In Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth, Wendy Kline explores midwifery as a worldview as well as a profession. Midwives have always had a vision of how babies should come into the world, and generally that meant eschewing the medicalized version of childbirth. Kline has written an engaging history of how midwives accomplished this feat in light of the reach and power of institutionalized medicine. Anyone interested in learning where and how babies were born will want to read this book. Midwives have been delivering babies at home forever. In early America, women bore their children there, typically surrounded by their female family members and friends. Hospital birth was a later innovation, as men entered medical school, became obstetricians, and convinced white women that it was safer to deliver in an institutional setting. But as we know that venue was not initially safer. Nineteenth-century hospitals exposed women to puerperal fever, as physicians and their instruments carried bacteria from one patient to the next. It was not until the mid-twentieth century and the advent of penicillin that medicine could control the infections that so frequently caused women’s deaths.