ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, the explanations given by medical and nursing histories for the absence of women as nurses in the Hippocratic texts were examined, and it was concluded that this absence was due not to Hippocratic silence about women in the role of nurses for the sick, but rather to cultural factors making it seem inappropriate and possibly even dangerous for a sick man to be nursed by a woman. In their attempts to gain control of cases, it would be in the interests of Hippocratic doctors to play on this imagery. When we turn to midwifery, another role within health care which we assume is naturally one for women, a far wider range of historical responses can be charted, because the proper gender for a midwife has been the topic of intense debate over the last three centuries, while – with the exception of specific areas, such as the care of the insane (Hughes 1994) – the female gender of a nurse has been taken for granted until far more recently. It was in England and the United States that ‘man-midwives’, in various forms, posed the most serious challenge to women in the role, so that it is within these countries that there have been the most significant attempts to reconstruct the ancient past in order to justify the present.
