ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on obstetrics and on the ways in which physicians used childbirth as an occasion to reflect upon their work. It explores the context of physicians' obstetrical training and the place of obstetrics in their overall practice. The chapter also focuses on the childbed and the particular social and medical realities revealed in doctors' attempts to describe the experience of birth. It suggests that when physicians struggled to communicate the meaning of obstetrical medicine—when they fashioned experience into stories—they discovered much about their work in general and brought into view the wider social relations that helped to shape it. Although the influence of southern physicians on their society was affected both by medicine's sharp limitations and by its emerging professionalism in this era, it was even more deeply rooted in the identity physicians drew from the rural community and its relationships. Several distinct circumstances or moments in obstetrical work were recurrent themes in physicians' writings.
