Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality 1800-1950

by Irvine Loudon

Overview

This is the first international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Over the last two hundred years different countries developed quite different systems of maternal care. Death in Childbirth is a meticulously researched analysis, firmly grounded in the available statistics, of the evolution of those systems between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and continental Europe. Loudon examines the effectiveness of various forms of maternal care by means of the measurement of maternal mortality— the number of women who died as a result of childbirth. His detailed study answers a number of important questions: What was the relative risk of a home or hospital delivery, or a delivery by a midwife as opposed to a doctor? What was the safest country in which to have a baby, and what were the factors which accounted for enormous international differences? Why, against all expectations, did maternal mortality fail to decline significantly until the late 1930s? It is an invaluable contribution to medical and social history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198229971
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/11/1993
Pages:	646
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.32(h) x 1.65(d)

Table of Contents

List of figuresList of tablesAbbreviationsIntroductionPart I. The Measurement of Maternal Mortality1. The measurement of maternal mortality2. Problems of measuring maternal mortalityPart II. The Causes of Maternal Mortality3. The determinants of maternal mortality4. Puerperal fever5. Toxaemia of pregnancy and eclampsia6. Obstetric haemorrhage7. Abortion8. Other causes of maternal mortalityPart III: Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality in Various Countries9. The importance of international comparisons10. Maternal mortality in pre-registration England11. The eighteenth-century and the origins of man-midwifery12. Maternal care in nineteenth-century Britain13. Maternal care in Britain 1900-193514. Maternal mortality in Britain from 1850 to the mid-1930s15. Maternal care and maternal mortality in Britain 1935-195016. The geography and politics of maternal care in the USA: Introduction17. Home deliveries and the general practitioner18. The American midwife19. The American lying-in hospital20. Attitudes to childbirth and the problem of pain21. The orgy of interference22. Maternal mortality in the USA23. Europe: Introduction24. European midwives25. European lying-in hospitals and obstetricians26. Maternal care and maternal mortality in selected European countries27. Australia and New Zealand28. Maternal and infant mortalityAppendicesSelect bibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Exhaustively researched, internationally comparative, and magisterially conceived and executed...A meticulously researched international description and analyses of maternal mortality and maternal care systems."—Journal of the History of Medicine

"An expensive book worth every penny, it is one which lactation consultants and all those interested in maternal and childcare issues today should own, read, and ponder."—Journal of Human Lactation

From the Publisher