ABSTRACT
Throughout the Deep South, during the colonial and antebellum periods, “countless generations of poor rural women, both white and Black, were attended in childbirth by granny midwives, mostly Black women whose skills were handed down from mother to daughter over the centuries.” This chapter examines physician advocacy for the elimination of granny midwifery within medical journals and notes the prominent arguments physicians used. Slaveholding American society valued granny midwives for their diasporic healing traditions and remedies. Between 1900 and 1940, health officials and medical doctors depicted granny midwifery as an unsafe and illegitimate form of health care by citing egregious mortality rates as a consequence of midwifery and castigating traditional methods of birth attendance. During the early twentieth century, medical doctors reasoned that midwife-assisted deliveries increased the mortality rates of mothers and infants.
