Childbirth is one of the keys to understanding the shifting cultural and political structures of a particular place and time. In no other time in history were Vietnamese childbirth traditions challenged, contested, and altered more than the colonial period when French doctors and administrators attempted to change Vietnamese ways of thinking on how childbirth should be viewed and conducted. But as French physicians ventured into indigenous communities, they found themselves negotiating with a myriad of Vietnamese cultural practices relating to childbirth and infant care. Thwarted by local resistance, cultural misunderstanding, and their own ambiguous and conflicting policy, the French never effectively accomplished the goal of their mission: the relocation of Vietnamese childbirth to a clinical setting. The Western model of technocratic birth neither displaced nor transformed indigenous birthing traditions as the French had envisioned. A plural system of maternity services catering to different groups of patients emerged in the 1930s and 1940s with some tilting toward French procedures and others opting for a hybridized Franco-Vietnamese model, whereas the rest, especially those beyond the reach of colonial health care, still attached to preexisting Vietnamese traditions as if the arrival of French medicine had never happened.

This book explores the interactions between Vietnamese childbirth traditions and French medicine and how they shaped maternal and infant health care in Vietnam1 during the colonial period from 1880 to 1945. As a history of both modern Vietnam and colonial medicine, it traces the introduction of Western obstetrical practices to Vietnam and the Vietnamese responses to changes in the traditionally private realms of childbirth and mothering. From the search for a cure against the deadly infant umbilical tetanus to the history of the first maternity hospitals and the professionalization of midwifery, this research underscores how the local expansion of Western biomedical birth was shaped as much by rivalries internal to the colonial state as it was by the global changes in medicine and the roles of local actors. The existence of pluralism in maternity services, many of which were based on local practices and beliefs, counters the assumption of colonial medicine as primarily a one-way exchange in which the colony was always on the receiving end of medical ideas originating from the West. The process of childbirth medicalization in Vietnam therefore can also be understood as a negotiated process whereby both French medicine and Vietnamese practices displayed compromises and adaptations to coexist with each other.