Between the foreign and the local: French midwifery, traditional practitioners, and vernacular medical knowledge about childbirth in Lima, Peru

Abstract

This article examines the politics of midwifery and the persecution of untitled female assistants in childbirth in early republican Peru. A close reading of late colonial publications and the works of Benita Paulina Cadeau Fessel, a French obstetriz director of a midwifery school in Lima, demonstrates both trans-Atlantic and local influences in the campaign against untitled midwives. Cadeau Fessel's efforts to promote midwifery built upon debates among writers in Peru's enlightened press, who vilified untrained midwives' and wet nurses' vernacular medical knowledge and associated them with Lima's underclass. One cannot understand the transfer of French knowledge about professional midwifery to Peru without reference to the social, political, and cultural context.