Droplets of Milk: Lactation and Midwifery

Abstract

For centuries, midwives and women have been put to shame by men and the Church. People were ignorant when it came to the biological functions of the human body. Faced with high mortality rates within an era of political unrest, the common folk desperately looked for someone to blame for the constant death both during and shortly after childbirth; as midwives were a common occupation in regions with little medical/economic support, one whose position often led them to witness death, midwives become the likely scapegoat for the high infant mortality rates. The contemporary social circumstances would be ripe for the people to turn on midwives due to a wild mixture of radical zealots, paranoid commoners, and oppressed members of the population. The feudal population would go even further by expanding their blame on mothers. So maddening was the craze to find a scapegoat, that mothers were condemned and accused of witchcraft should any form of perceived harm come to the child, whether or not they actually had any hand in the matter.