A midwife received her training during a long apprenticeship with an experienced midwife — very often an older relative. Midwives incorporated folk medicine, herbal remedies, and ritual. Their skills weren’t limited to labor, delivery and care of the new mother and infant. They also provided medical treatment to free and enslaved people in their community and occasionally to white citizenry.
Sharon A. Robinson, “A Historical Development of Midwifery in the Black Community: 1600–1940,” Journal of Nurse-Midwifery 29 (July/August 1984): 247–250. Nurse-midwife Sharon Robinson writes that there were midwives on the first boatloads of African slaves in 1619, p. 247.
Tracy Webber, “The African American Midwife During Antebellum Slavery,” in Celebrating the Contributions of Academic Midwifery: A Symposium on the Occasion of the Retirement From the Faculty of the Yale University School of Nursing of Professor Helen Varney Burst, ed. Donna Diers (New Haven: Yale University School of Nursing, 2005), 84–91, 88–89.
Herbert C. Covey. African American Slave Medicine: Herbal and Non-Herbal Treatments. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007
Todd Lee Savitt. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002
Linda Janet Holmes, guest curator, Reclaiming Midwives: Pillars of Community Support, Exhibit Booklet (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, Exhibit November 14, 2005– August 6, 2006).
1st U.S. Colored Cavalry 