ABSTRACT
Obstetrical case notes of physicians engaged in daily practice add an important perspective, hitherto neglected, to the history of nineteenth-century obstetrics. Beginning in the 1960s, social historians, especially feminist scholars, produced a vigorous revision of the hitherto accepted version of nineteenth-century obstetrics. Many of the physicians kept obstetrical case notes only for a few yean in a long practice. The obstetrical practice of nineteenth-century physicians coincided with the years when physicians were increasingly accepted as providers of obstetrical care. Judith Walzer Leavitt has indicated that obstetrics was an imprecise science at best, and the case notes, written for their personal use, demonstrate that physicians were far less certain of themselves than their professional status might have predicted. Contrary to the thesis that middle class and upper class women, primarily urban women, were the basis for physicians' obstetrical practice, physicians also delivered many babies of poor urban women and women in rural areas.
