Background
Medical care in the early United States was very different from what it is today. There were doctors, but they only performed very specific tasks like bloodletting and their services were very expensive. Most people relied on the services of midwives for medical care.
Today, a midwife is a woman trained to deliver babies and care for pregnant and postpartum women. But in early America, midwives played a much larger role in caring for their communities. Midwives knew herbal remedies and treatments to address many common illnesses and injuries. They could forage for ingredients and make their own medicines. When someone in the community went into labor or fell ill, their family would call the midwife to examine and care for them. If someone died, a midwife would help prepare the body for burial.
Midwives learned their trade by working with other midwives. In this way, important medical and community information was gathered and passed from woman to woman. Being a midwife was one of the most respectable jobs a woman could have outside the home in the early United States.
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