Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen, ‘Midwives: Birthing care professionals in eighteenth-century Sweden and Finland’

This chapter focuses on the educated, professional midwives in the early modern urban world. Midwives obtained a profession regulated by law despite their sex or marital status. This chapter stresses the importance of formal training, arranged by the Collegium Medicum, which trained surgeons, pharmacists and midwives, thus paralleling women’s training to a profession with wider opportunities for men’s professional careers. The social standing of midwives, their skills, how their professionalism was experienced and valued by contemporaries and who relied on the services is also discussed in this chapter.