Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Tables
- Western Maternity and Medicine: An Introduction
- 1 Safely Delivered? Insights into Late Nineteenth-Century Australian Maternity Care from Coronial Investigations into Maternal Deaths
- 2 Pregnancy, Pathology and Public Morals: Making Antenatal Care in Edinburgh around 1900
- 3 ‘The Peculiar and Complex Female Problem’: The Church of Scotland and Health Care for Unwed Mothers, 1900–1948
- 4 Taking ‘Advantage of the Facilities and Comforts … Offered’: Women's Choice of Hospital Delivery in Interwar Edinburgh
- 5 ‘What Women Want’: Childbirth Services and Women's Activism in New Zealand, 1900–1960
- 6 'Twixt God and Geography: The Development of Maternity Services in Twentieth-Century Ireland
- 7 Test Tubes and Turpitude: Medical Responses to the Infertile Patient in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland
- 8 Women's Experiences of the Maternity Services in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, c. 1970–1990
- 9 From Muller to Johnson Controls: Mothers and Workplace Health in the US, from Protective Labour Legislation to Fetal Protection Policies
- Notes
- Index
4 - Taking ‘Advantage of the Facilities and Comforts … Offered’: Women's Choice of Hospital Delivery in Interwar Edinburgh
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Tables
- Western Maternity and Medicine: An Introduction
- 1 Safely Delivered? Insights into Late Nineteenth-Century Australian Maternity Care from Coronial Investigations into Maternal Deaths
- 2 Pregnancy, Pathology and Public Morals: Making Antenatal Care in Edinburgh around 1900
- 3 ‘The Peculiar and Complex Female Problem’: The Church of Scotland and Health Care for Unwed Mothers, 1900–1948
- 4 Taking ‘Advantage of the Facilities and Comforts … Offered’: Women's Choice of Hospital Delivery in Interwar Edinburgh
- 5 ‘What Women Want’: Childbirth Services and Women's Activism in New Zealand, 1900–1960
- 6 'Twixt God and Geography: The Development of Maternity Services in Twentieth-Century Ireland
- 7 Test Tubes and Turpitude: Medical Responses to the Infertile Patient in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland
- 8 Women's Experiences of the Maternity Services in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, c. 1970–1990
- 9 From Muller to Johnson Controls: Mothers and Workplace Health in the US, from Protective Labour Legislation to Fetal Protection Policies
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Immediately before World War I, only a minority of Edinburgh parturients were confined in hospital. Home birth, typically attended by either the family doctor or pupil midwives from local training institutions, was the norm. However, by the outbreak of World War II, more than half chose to deliver in an institution, either a maternity hospital or a nursing home, electing to take ‘advantage of the facilities and comforts … offered by hospital treatment’. This was both a rapid and a groundbreaking change for the city: in Britain as a whole, the tipping point of more than 50 per cent hospital births was only reached after World War II. This chapter draws on contemporary institutional records of both inpatient and domiciliary deliveries to ask what caused such a major change in the behaviour of women in Edinburgh.
Implicit in much of the early historiography of the move to hospital birth is the belief that women were forced, by either direct medical pressure or the reduction of domiciliary services, to opt for inpatient care. Less ideological examinations of the medicalization of childbirth have suggested that moving to hospital reduced women's fear of birth and were thus part of a gradual acceptance of the benefits of medical care.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Western Maternity and Medicine, 1880–1990 , pp. 65 - 80Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014