Exercise for 26 November 2018Note: Try to summarize the following paragraphs below individually and then try to come up with a single line summary/title for the extract. I strongly encourage you to do this exercise mentally - without writing the summaries anywhere. Once done, type your summary/title below and read the article and it's title and match the article's summary with yours. Both the summaries should be close enough. Try to time yourself - take no more than 3 minutes to complete this activity.Sample:The eighteenth century saw some of the most significant changes to childbirth care in Britain before the twentieth century, and included the emergent popularity of the man-midwife, formal training in obstetrics for surgeons, and the establishment of lying-in hospitals in urban areas, particularly in London. Despite these changes, the vast majority of women of the lower orders of society were attended by female midwives during labour and delivery throughout the century. Skilled midwives were thus undoubtedly ubiquitous in early modern British society. Their presence can be found in a range of archival sources, and social, cultural and medical historians of early modern England have utilised these for diverse histories of childbirth. Welsh sources have not been considered in any of these studies, and therefore the nature of childbirth in early modern Wales remains largely unknown.
Evidence of midwives in Wales can be found in a wide range of documents, including applications for licences to practice midwifery, Court of Great Sessions and quarter sessions records, parish overseer, churchwarden and vestry accounts, as well as burial records and wills. Only ten applications for licences to practise midwifery have survived in the Welsh ecclesiastical records held by the National Library of Wales, and found in the collections for the diocese of Bangor and Llandaff. Many more were likely produced, however the survival rate for such documents in Wales is poor. Court of Great Sessions records have a much greater rate of survival, and midwives appear frequently as witnesses in the approximately 140 infanticide cases included in the Crime and Punishment database between 1730 and 1800. Twelve of these cases have been examined here. Quarter sessions records from across Wales have also survived to varying degrees and are held in county archives offices. The session rolls of the Montgomery quarter sessions from the 1750s to 1790s have been examined for this study. Finally, parish overseers of the poor, churchwarden and vestry accounts survive with varying quality for parishes across all Welsh counties, and contain hundreds, if not thousands, of references of payments made to midwives for the delivery of pauper women. For this study, the accounts of 23 parishes across four Welsh counties have been analysed.
P1: Records of British Midwives in mid century vs Poor Records of Welsh Midwives
P2: Sources of records about midwives in Welsh.