Dissertation Defense Announcement Ph.D. in Higher Education Program: Arielle L’Esperance “The Afterbirth of a Nation: Midwifery, Medical Education, and Nation-Making in Revolutionary and Antebellum America”

Over the course of the eighteenth century, college-educated physicians increasingly became scientific authorities on childbirth. While midwifery had traditionally been considered a female profession that existed in spaces centered around women, the profession became increasingly associated with college-educated physicians and spaces of higher education. In order to examine the institutionalization of medical education and its subsequent impact on midwifery, my research will focus on the development of medical education and the medical professoriate in Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey and the subsequent expansion of medical education in the South. My research will illustrate how midwifery became absorbed into the curricula of medical schools and how the rise of the medical professoriate fundamentally altered the profession of midwifery in America. Medical schools in Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey were at the nexus of transformations that medicine and higher education underwent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As motherhood and childbirth became increasingly important to republican ideology, formalized medical education simultaneously created a medical professoriate that specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. Through public lectures and publications, higher education provided physicians with a means of advertising themselves to the public. While historians typically link the decline of midwifery as a female profession to physicians’ use of forceps and anesthesia, the role of higher education and the rise of the medical professoriate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century must be further examined in order to understand how midwifery became absorbed into the medical profession.

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