'The Early Modern Birthing Room and Interprofessional Collaboration'
Image credit: Wellcome Apocalypse. Source: Wellcome Collection. 38v
"Studies into maternal perceptions of the experience of modern childbirth indicate that “[p]oor interprofessional collaboration [is] detrimental to the quality, safety, and experience of maternity care.”[1] Labouring women suffer when communication between their practitioners is poor, a problem that has been attributed to medical “organisation culture, for example, hierarchy and failure to function as a team.”[2]
What evidence is there to suggest that early modern medical practitioners practiced interprofessional collaboration while overseeing births? While tensions between midwives and surgeons may have negatively influenced outcomes in the birthing chamber,[3] we can still find shared moments of collaboration and consensus on the procedures to be followed to ensure the safe delivery of both the mother and the child in professional accounts of childbirth. Using the definition proposed by A. A. Schulz and M. A. Wirtz according to which medical collaboration can be understood as “[t]he purposeful linking of profession-specific knowledge and skills,”[4] we can extend previous discussions of the early modern birthing room that have considered dynamics of blame and mistrust between practitioners in the management of childbirth...[5] (Read the full article on the NOTCOM" Website)
NOTCOM is a five-year research project in the history of philosophy of science funded by an ERC Advanced Grant in 2023-2027. It is dedicated to the epistemology, methods, and communication strategies of collective science in the seventeenth century.
Home to a team of senior researchers, post-doctoral fellows, post-graduate students, research engineers, and project managers, NOTCOM establishes a unique and innovative research environment between two units of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Lyon and in Oxford.
Discover the Observatory, a series of blog entries about anecdotes, conflicts and controversies that shaped the history of sciences and philosophy.
