Why did I become a midwife? I think it started with wanting first to be a nurse. I remember when I was in first grade, I was sick and, of course, this was back in the years when we did not have all the medicine we have today. It was in probably 1931 or 1932 and public health nursing was very much a part of our life in those days. We relied on the public health nurse. I didn't get to school one day and the school nurse came to visit me. She was this tall, beautiful, gentle woman with her overseas gray cap, her gray red lined cape, and her immaculately groomed gray and white uniform. She put her cool hand on my fevered brow and assured me that I would be all right. I looked up at her and thought, I want to be like her someday. From that moment on, I always wanted to be a nurse.
When I graduated from high school, I had no idea how I would ever become a nurse because we were a very large family with not many resources. One day, I came home from work in the Raytheon factory, turned on the radio and heard that the Bolton Act had been passed. Francis Bolton, congresswoman from Ohio, during World War II, proposed the Bolton Act to staff the hospitals in the United States. Most of the nurses and physicians had been recruited into the armed services. All the announcement said was that if you want to be a nurse, go to your local hospital and sign up for the Cadet Nurse Corp. So, the next day I didn't go to work. I went to my local hospital in Waltham Massachusetts. Overnight, I was in uniform and on the wards taking care of patients for a probationary period of six months. The hospitals were in dire straits in those days. They had very few graduate nurses. I think we had one graduate nurse per shift in our hospital with 200 beds.
I finished nursing, but vowed I would never do obstetrical nursing. I was a student nurse in the early 1940s, during the days now referred to as the "knock 'em out, drag 'em out" days of obstetrics. Twilight sleep and the amnesiac scopolamine were the norm for women in labor. The women did not know what was happening to them. They were often out of control and would have only fragmented, haunting memories of their labor and birth. Because they were heavily drugged, they were put in straight jackets with side rails on the bed to keep them from climbing the walls and hurting themselves. Almost every woman had an episiotomy and her baby was delivered with forceps. The baby was also drugged and had to be observed in the nursery. I thought to myself, I'm never going to work in this field of nursing and I'm never going to have a baby because no one is ever going to reduce me to that level. The best thing I got out of my student obstetrical nursing experience was the picture of Mary Breckinridge on a horse on the face page of the nursing textbook that told me about the Frontier Nursing Service. I thought, now that's what I'd like to do. For some reason, I didn't connect her with obstetrics. I associated her with public health nursing, probably because of my school nurse.
I applied to the Frontier Nursing Service after I graduated but was told that I needed to take a few years to mature, so I did. I worked at our hospital for a few years, first as a staff nurse and then as night supervisor. I then went to Chicago and worked at the University of Chicago Clinics, in home nursing and as a camp nurse during the summer.
After a few years in the Midwest, I applied to the Frontier Nursing Service again and they said, "Come!" I went to Kentucky in 1951. My first assignment at the tiny hospital was the night shift taking care of the general side, which included medicine, surgery and pediatrics. The Midwifery School took care of the OB side. Every few weeks I would ask when I would be getting a horse. After all, I went to Kentucky to ride horseback and do public health nursing. I was told, "Oh, you have to be a midwife to ride a horse" I said, "But that's obstetrics isn't it?" I was told, "No, its midwifery." I said, "But I don't want to do that. I decided that I should prepare to leave. The Dean of the Midwifery School, hearing that I was planning to leave, came to me one night when I was working on the general side of the hospital and said, "I understand you're leaving and that you don't want to be a midwife?" I said, "I don't want anything to do with obstetrics." She asked me if I had ever been on a home birth and would I like to go on one before I left. I said, I would. That night, I went off duty at midnight. About 1:00 or 2:00 AM she called me to go out to a mother who was in labor. The mother lived in a board and batten type house of one room, a common dwelling for families in the mountains. It was a bit crowded but the mother had erysipelas, which is contagious, and so she was not brought into the hospital. There were two double beds with four children across one double bed and the mother and her youngest child in the other. The father was taking care of the stove and keeping the water hot. People always want to know why fathers boil water. They boiled water because in those days because there was no inside plumbing and often the open wells were contaminated. Therefore, in order to have hot water and pure water for bathing the baby and drinking and so forth, they boiled the water. There was always a kettle of water on the back of the stove.
When we arrived, I was told to stand in the corner and watch. The instructor (the Dean of the school) had a student midwife with her and they proceeded with the care of the mother. Now remember, I had come from a scene, if you remember, that was sort of like Ben Casey on TV. On this TV show, the mother was monitored in labor, usually by a student nurse. When the doctor arrived — just as the baby's head was coming (it was important to get the doctor there as close to that exact time as possible), everything then focused on the doctor. They then put the mother on a stretcher and rushed her into the delivery room, where the nurses all helped the doctor get into his gloves and gown and made sure that he had everything he needed. No one paid attention to the mother because she didn't know what was going on anyway. She was shuffled to the delivery room, shifted to the delivery table, her legs put up in stirrups, handcuffed and tied to the table, etc.
What I witnessed in this humble mountain cabin was so different. The mother was sitting on the edge of the bed most of the time and the nurse-midwives were kneeling at her side. The whole configuration of the scene, where the mother was up and the providers of care, the midwives, were down below her, serving her it was so very different from the delivery rooms. In the delivery rooms where I had been, the mother was down and out and the doctor was up and over. As I watched the midwives, they hardly said a word out loud to the mother. It was like watching a pantomime. They did a lot of touching and stroking and massage and they would whisper something to her once in awhile or to each other. I watched this whole scene of a very powerful mountain woman in absolute control of her labor and birth. The children stayed asleep during the labor. When the mother reached the point where she was ready, she gave a grunt and indicated to midwives that she was ready. They scurried and got set up for the birth. The baby slipped into the hands of the midwife and the first real noise in the house was the baby's cry when it was born. When that happened, the first child in the bed of four woke up and looked all around at everyone with big black eyes, at the midwives and the mother and so forth. He then poked the child next to him and that child woke up and looked all around and then poked the child next to him and that went across the bed until there were four pairs of eyes moving in unison about the room. They never said a word, just watched until they were told to get up and get ready. After it was all over, the father, to whom I hadn't been paying any attention at all, apparently had gone out and killed a chicken. He had plucked it and put it in a stew pot because all of a sudden, here was this whole meal on the table, including biscuits and gravy and chicken - obviously a festive meal for this family. We all sat down and had breakfast together and talked about the birth. The thing that impressed me the most about this was the power of that mountain woman and I understood for the first time the difference between giving birth, which is what she did, and being delivered, which is what I had been exposed to as a student nurse. I went back to the Frontier Nursing Service Headquarters and signed up at six in the morning for the School of Midwifery and as my husband often says, "Yes, and you've been on a rampage ever since."