Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants, Brought to Bed reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present.
Judith Walzer Leavitt's study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital. She explains that childbearing women and their physicians gradually changed birth places because they believed the increased medicalization would make giving birth safer and more comfortable. Ironically, because of infection, infant and maternal...

An invaluable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, this highly regarded and widely used social history of medicine and public health in the United States is now available in a third edition. Extensively revised and updated, it includes twenty-one new essays; graphs illustrating the rise in deaths caused by HIV, homicide, and suicide; and a greatly expanded Guide to Further Reading. Entirely new sections on Sickness and Health, Early American Medicine, Therapeutics, the Art of Medicine, and Public Health and Personal Hygiene have been added, supplementing updated sections on...

In this second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt has collected 35 articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Organized chronologically and then by topic, this volume covers studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the 19th century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late 19th and 20th centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives,...

Using fathers' first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature, Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a new perspective on the changing role of expectant fathers from the 1940s to the 1980s. She shows how, as men moved first from the hospital waiting room to the labor room in the 1960s, and then on to the delivery and birthing rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they became progressively more involved in the birth experience and their influence over events expanded. With careful attention to power and privilege, Leavitt charts not only...

Based on personal accounts by birthing women and their medical attendants, Brought to Bed reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the late twentieth century. Judith Walzer Leavitt's classic study focuses on the traditional woman-centered home-birthing practices, their replacement by male doctors, and the movement from the home to the hospital. Leavitt narrates the shifting power of childbearing women and their physicians, as well as changes in infant and maternal mortality. She also discusses how women have attempted to retrieve some of the traditional women--and...