Introduction

The first act of the historian, the act which constitutes all the history (s)he subsequently writes, is to decide to write the history of something. That ‘something’ is naturally, normally, taken from the world around us, the world of which the historian is a part. And so it is that in roughly the last hundred years we have had histories of midwifery, of obstetrics, and of their professions – female midwives, male obstetricians. The writing of the histories coincides with the existence of these present realities of which the histories have been written. Such history-writing forms a specimen both of ‘tunnel history’ and of ‘present-centred history’. Equally, and of special concern in the present volume, it is ‘iatrocentric’: that is to say, histories of, say, obstetrics are inevitably written from the viewpoint of the obstetrician. The survival of evidence in handy packages (treatises of obstetrics/midwifery, written mainly by men) conspires with the attitude of the historian to perpetuate this state of affairs. There is an overwhelming tendency to see the story as a technical matter, to dignify the techniques therefore with a special status, and thus to end not only with a whiggish history of inevitable ‘progress’ (the present day being the age of perfected technique), but also with an account which excludes the viewpoint of the very people who must have been at the heart of the story: the women who actually gave birth to our ancestors.