In Perfect Motherhood, Rima D. Apple shows how the growing belief that mothers need to be savvy about the latest scientific directives has shifted the role of expert away from the mother and toward the professional establishment.

Oh joy, oh rapture : describing the nineteenth-century miscarriage -- Enveloped in mystery : pregnancy and miscarriage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- Before its due time : setting standards in miscarriage, 1830-1860s -- Dr. Taylor went up in the uterus : miscarriage treatment and intrusive interventions, 1860-1900 -- The body in the clot : medical interest in miscarried tissues, 1870-1912

Welcome to a work of history unlike any other. Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity—the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? Can one capture the historical trail of mothers? How? In Mother Is a Verb, the historian Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. It is at once intimate and expansive, lyrical and precise. As a history, Mother Is a Verb draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London’s East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences. As a memoir, Mother Is a Verb becomes a method of asking new questions and probing lost pasts in order to historicize the smallest, even the most mundane of human experiences. Is there a history to interruption, to the sound of an infant’s cry, to sleeplessness? Knott finds answers not through the telling of grand narratives, but through the painstaking accumulation of a trellis of anecdotes. And all the while, we can feel the child on her hip.

Excerpt from Maidenhood and Motherhood, or Ten Phases of Woman's Life: How to Protect the Health, Contribute to the Physical and Mental Development, and Increase the Happiness of Womankind There is o higher study for womankind than woman. There is no way in which the women of to-day can so well or surely help themselves and those about them and confer lasting benefits upon their children and their race as by learning to understand their own delicate organizations and how best to cherish and protect them. Mothers mold the characters of their sons and daughters, by their early training or by want of it, either for good or for evil. Even the best mothers, either through mistaken delicacy or want of information, often neglect to instruct their daughters in those matters about which they most need to know. The little girl realizes that she is not a boy; she does not know why. She changes to maidenhood without realizing the great purpose which Nature is working out, and often comes to womanhood without more than suspecting the grave responsibility of living and giving life. Her children die in infancy and she is tempted to blame Providence for afflictions which it might have been within her power to avert. If they grow to mature years it may be with a weak constitution or imperfect health, which had their cause and beginning in her own lack of information before they were born. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Over the last hundred years, pregnancy and childbirth has become increasingly safe – yet it is still a site of risk, and a contested ground on which health professionals and pregnant women both face high costs of error. In this context, all those involved in managing pregnancy and birth are expected to identify and mitigate risk: pregnant women are subject to increasing surveillance to ensure the safety of the unborn foetus, and every aspect of childbearing is increasingly medicalised. This publication brings together fascinating social science research to explore the ways in which risk is both created and managed in pregnancy and childbirth. The introductory chapters reflect on the changing social context of childbirth, in particular the medicalisation of both pregnancy and childbirth with development of specialist practitioners, such as obstetricians and midwives who claim to have the knowledge, technology and skills to identify and manage the risks involved. The next three chapters that examine the ways in which women’s behaviour during pregnancy is constructed as potentially risky -- for example smoking, drinking alcohol and taking drugs, and how these risks are monitored and mitigated. The final two parts of the book address the construction of and responses to both medicalisation and risk in childbirth. Altogether, it represents a valuable insight into the complex world of pregnancy, childbirth and risk. This book brings together editorials and articles originally published in special and open issues of Health, Risk and Society.

This is a catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of rare books dealing with 'popular medicine' in early America which is housed at the University of Rochester Medical School library. The books described in the catalogue were written by physicians and other professionals to provide information for the non-medical audience. The books taught human anatomy, hygiene, temperance and diet, how to maintain health, and how to cope with illness especially when no professional help was available. The books promoted a healthy lifestyle for the readers, giving guidance on everything from physical fitness and recreation to the special health needs of women. The collection consists of works dealing with reproduction (from birth control to delivering and caring for a baby), venereal disease, home-nursing, epidemics, and the need for public sex education.