Midwifery in the 1900s

[thickoeric]

My great-grandmother appears in the 1901 census as being in someone else's house and described as "Midwife" and indeed the other people in that house are a couple and "son, aged 1/2 hr. old". Is there any way I can find out if she was a qualified midwife or whether she just used to nip round and help out the neighbours?

[dzug2]

You might be interested in this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monthly_nurse

which suggests there were no real qualifications at the time

[dotty.]

do you have any other primary source that might give further clues? later/earlier returns? marriage certificate? My great grandfather's half sister was a career nurse with a london teaching hospital and travelled all over the world in her job from the 1890s up to 1912 when she married an officer in the army she had been nursing.

[NOX]

One of my great grannies was both the midwife and the person who laid out corpses- hatching and dispatching so to speak:-)

[thickoeric]

Many thanks for your replies.

All the earlier censuses just show her as "wife" so I suspect she wasn't exactly a trained midwife at all!

[echokilo]

http://www.nursing.ma...s/officeofmidwife.pdf