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"Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles" is a book that explores the complex and messy process of producing mortality data and how it shapes our understanding of maternal mortality. The author, Claire Wendland, draws on her experience as an obstetrician-gynecologist, epidemiologist, and medical anthropologist to provide insights into the causes of maternal death in Malawi. The book examines various partial stories about maternal mortality, including the structural, medical, technological, statistical, and political factors that contribute to it. It also highlights the role of scarcity, debt, and reproductive governance in shaping maternal mortality outcomes. While the book provides a comprehensive understanding of the issue, it lacks clear policy implications for addressing maternal mortality. Overall, "Partial Stories" is a valuable resource for researchers and policymakers interested in maternal health. [Extracted from the article]

The book "Midwife of History: Violence in Literature, Performance, and Audiovisual Media in Latin America" is a collection of eighteen articles that analyze the representation of systematic violence perpetrated against minority groups in Latin America. The editors, Osvaldo Sandoval-León and Chrystian Zegarra, present the book as an effort to contribute to the studies on violence and memory in the region, considering the combination of writing, visual, and bodily spaces in literary, film, artistic, and performative works. The book covers a wide variety of topics and contexts, and analyzes works by renowned authors and artists from different Latin American countries, the United States, and France. The articles also explore themes such as memory, impunity, and lack of resolution. Overall, the book successfully complements and continues the studies on violence in Latin America, allowing for perspectives on the recent past of the continent to be formed. [Extracted from the article]

"Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America" by Marcia D. Nichols explores the rise of male midwives in a field historically dominated by women. The book examines how these men had to overcome stereotypes and accusations of quackery and sexual predation to establish themselves as professionals. It focuses on the strategies used by male midwives to assert their professionalism and gain public acceptance. The book also highlights the role of textbooks in justifying the existence of male midwifery and their influence in the field. Overall, the book provides insight into the consolidation of authority for male midwives in the English-speaking Atlantic world, while also acknowledging women's agency in choosing their birthing attendants. [Extracted from the article]

Much more can be said of the book's strengths: the writings by West Africans - including women and men - that Cooper uncovered, and the sophisticated approach to wholistic demography that will set a new bar for future studies of childbirth and reproductive politics in both developing and developed societies. These details do matter, and Cooper brings them together to convincingly show that the perilous situation of fertility in Niger today is the outcome of a concatenation of historical forces. [Extracted from the article]

The book "History of Midwives in Spain" by Dolores Ruiz-Berdún offers a detailed insight into the evolution and professionalism of midwives throughout the history of Spain. The book addresses topics such as the antiquity of the profession, the different ways to access it in the 19th and 20th centuries, the rivalry between qualified midwives and women without a title, and the confrontation between midwives and physician-surgeons. It also explores the personal characteristics of midwives and traditional birth attendants, as well as descriptions of their work in urban and rural settings. The book provides testimonies about the methods used in childbirth and the instruments employed. The text discusses the history of traditional birth attendants in Spain and their evolution over time. It mentions that traditional birth attendants also performed legal and juridical functions, such as determining if a woman had recently given birth or in cases of rape. However, not all of them enjoyed a good reputation and they were associated with witches and sorceresses. Over time, the place of childbirth shifted from homes to specialized institutions, such as hospitals and maternity houses. The danger of puerperal fever is highlighted, which caused the death of many women until its origin was understood and remedies were found. The creation of shelters for pregnant women during the Civil War and the implementation of the Infant and Maternal Health Law in 1941 are also mentioned. The text concludes by emphasizing the importance of midwives in women's and families' health education. [Extracted from the article]

Knowledge, Power, and Women's Reproductive Health in Japan, 1690-1945, written by Yuki Terazawa Dutch-style medicine and its specific views may also have deserved some consideration, even if - as Terazawa correctly observes - it was not the main driver of the eighteenth-century epistemic shift in obstetrics. Of interest is Terazawa's use of ethnographic sources to give voice to the midwives and expectant mothers, providing a glimpse of the uneven and not always smooth diffusion of modern health practices on the ground. [Extracted from the article]

In I Changing Birth in the Andes i , Lucia Guerra-Reyes critically examines the implementation of the "Peruvian Intercultural Birth Policy" (IBP). Guerra-Reyes concludes that, despite the promise of the IBP, the actual practice of so-called intercultural birth in Peru is yet another form of government coercion of indigenous women and their reproduction. [Extracted from the article]

This is a book review turned research paper. The aim is to estimate the differences in the maternal mortality rate (MMR) between untrained midwives, expert midwives, and the famous obstetrician Dr Smellie in eighteenth-century Britain. The paper shows that the birth attendance practices of the expert midwife Mrs Stone and of Dr Smellie were very similar, though Stone used her hands whereas Smellie used forceps. Both applied the same invasive techniques to successfully deliver women with similar fatal complications, techniques that untrained midwives and most surgeons of the time could not perform. However, the same procedures, if used for normal births, would have increased the MMR. So, the key to the low MMR of both was that they kept interventions away from the majority of births that were normal. The paper quantifies the likely MMR for a 'Stone and Smellie style' birth attendance and concludes that the wider dissemination of their techniques can explain the decline in the British MMR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the book "Midwifery in Scotland: A History," by Lindsay Reid is presented.

A review of the book "Things Past Telling: A Novel," by Sheila Williams, is presented.

Reviews the book 'The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London,' by Doreen Evenden.