Mothers and their midwives in seventeenth-century London

Social historians of medicine have been taken to task in recent years for their single-minded concentration on medicine and its practitioners to the exclusion of the consumer of health care services.1 Previous studies of early modern midwifery have paid scant attention to the identities of midwives’ clients and to clients’ perceptions of the women who were so intimately concerned with their well-being and that of their infants.2