DoHistoryThe Book site maptech helpabout sitesearch


A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Page 162 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

 

December 1793: 'Birth 50, Birth 51'

 

NOVEMBER

15  6  At Mr Parkers. Mrs Holdman here.
Cloudy & Cold. Mrs Holdman here to have a gown made. Mrs Benjamin to have a Cloak Cut. Polly Rust after work. I was Calld to Mr Parkers aftern. Mr Ballard is better.

16  7  At ditoes. Mrs Holdman left here.
Cloudy. I was at Mr Parkers and Colonel Sewalls. Mrs Parker unwell. Colman Bled her at Evening.

17  F  At ditoes & Mr Poores. Birth 47th a daughter. At Capt Meloys allso
Rainy. I was Calld from Mr Parkers at 2 hour morn to Mr Poores. Doct Page was Calld before my arival. I Extracted the Child, a dagt. He Chose to Close the Loin. I returnd home at 8 hour morning. Receivd 6/ as a reward. Mr Ballard & Ephm attend worship, Dolly & Sally aftern. Charls and John Coks supt here. I was calld to Capt meloys at 11 hour Evening. Raind. Birth Mr Poores daughter X X

18  2  At Capt Meloys. Birth 48th. I receivd 24/.
At Capt Meloys. His Lady in Labour. Her women Calld (it was

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 163 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

a sever storm of rain Cleard of with snow). My patient deliverd 8 hour 5 minute Evening of a fine daughter. Her attendants Mrss Cleark, Duttun, Sewall, & myself. We had an Elligant per and I tarried all night.
Capt Meloys dagt X X

19  3  At ditoes & Mr Parkers. Mr Turner here.
Clear. I returnd home after dineing. Revd Mr Turner and Esq Cony supt here. I was Calld to Mr Parkers at 11 Evening.

20  4  At Mr Parkers
Cloudy. I was at Mr Parkers.

21  5  At ditoes
Cloudy morn. Clear of at night. I was at Mr Parkers. Mrs Cowen there. Hannah North allso.

22  6  At ditoes
Cloudy morn. Clear at noone. I came home. Find my famely well. Mr Ballard gone to Winslow.

23  7  At Capt Meloys
Cloudy. Mr James Page here. Mr Ballard paid him 6/ towards his Tax. I went to see Mrs Meloy. Find her Tolerable Comfortable. Old Lady Coutch there.

24  F  At home. Doct Cony here
A very heavy rain foren. Sun shone at 12. Mr Ballard went to meeting. Dolly is unwell pukeing in the night. Esquire Coney Calld here. He has been to Join Mr Smith & Mrs Nancy Cleark in Marriage.

25  2  At Esquire Matthew Howards [Haywards]. Birth 49th.
Clear & pleast. Dolly went to her Brothers. Polly Pollard Came home with her to have a gown made. Esquire M Howard Calld

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 164 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

me to see his Lady who was delivd of a daughter at 8 hour 10 minutes Evening I tarried all night.
Birth Esquire Howards daughter X X

26  3  At Ditoes.
Clear. I left my patients very well at 7. Arivd at home at 9 hour morn. Receivd 7/6 as a reward. Mr Ballard & sons bringing brick from the hook. Dolly & Polly Pollard are gone to the shops this afternoon.

27  4  At Mr Poors. Mrs Greely there.
Clear. Son Pollard brot my daughter here to warp a web. Polly went home with him. Mr Poor Calld me to see his wife who is not so well as Could be wisht. Find Mr Livermores sons Laying a hearth in our kitchen. The Bridg acrost the gully was Coverd this day.

28  5  at the hook
Clear. Mr Ballard gone to survey for Esquire Petingail. Daughter Pollard went home. I went to the hook. Mrs Poor is yet low. Mr Lathrop paid me my fee for attending his wife the 19th of March last.

29  6  at Mr Parkers
Clear. I was Calld to Mr Parkers.

30  7  at ditoes
at ditoes

DECEMBER

1, 2, 3, 4, 5  At Mr Parkers 5 Days
At Mr Parkers. His Lady is about house. The river is difucult to pass. I knitt while gone from home 2 pair gloves and 5 pair & 1/2 mitts. The river was past on the ice this day.

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 165 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

6  6  At Mr Whites
Clear. I was Calld to Benn Whites at 2 hour morning. Wrode in a sleigh.

7  7  At Whites & Parkers. Birth 50. Birth 51.
At Whites. His wife was deliverd at 12 0 Clok of a daughter and I was Calld back to Mr Parkers. His Lady was deliverd at 9 hour 30 minutes of a daughter. I am some fatagud. Son Town here.
Births Mr Whites and Mr Parkers daughters.

8  F  At Mr Parkers. Returnd home
Snow hail & rain. Mr Parker went for his Nurs. I left his Lady at 4 pm as well as Could be Expected & walkt over the river. Wrode Mr Ballards hors home. I had a wrestless night by fataug & weting my feet.

9  2  At Mr Finnys & the hook
Clear. Mr Ballard Surveying for Mr Pollard & Page. I went to Mr Finnys & Benjamins. Brot my wollen web yarn home & went to Mr Peter Clearks. They ingagd to weav it. I Calld at Capt Meloys Store. Bot a Shall [shawl?] at 5/6. He made me a present of a muslin apron. I bot at Capt Fillebrowns 5 2/1 pints Brandy, 2/9; 3 puter poringers, 4/6; paper pins, /10. Total 8/1.

The fifty-three deliveries Martha performed in 1793 took her along the length of the town and beyond, from Henry McCausland's mill at Cobbossee Great Pond as far north as Winslow, where Lucy Towne gave birth to her ninth child. The year's deliveries encompassed the town socially as well as geographically. She delivered Captain Molloy's and Esquire Hayward's ladies as well as Mr. Cummings's servant "Bulah" and "Black Hitty."1 Her patients in 1793 included the wives of Samuel Norcross, lime-burner and potter; Jeremiah Dummer, mer-

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 166 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

[Map: Hallowell, showing deliveries]

see Ephraim Ballard's 1794 map of Hallowell

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 167 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

chant and potash manufacturer; and Theophilus Hamlin, housewright, as well as common woodsmen and farmers in the outlying precincts of the town.2 She found it "very bad wriding" to Asa Mason's house, though this year she didn't complain, as she had in another, of encountering a plague of fleas. She delivered the wife of William Pitt, who had a house, shop, and capital in trade worth 810 pounds, as well as the wife of John LeLejunee (she spelled it Lashnee), who had a bakehouse valued at thirty-one pounds. Each family had a story. Thomas Hinkley's son ("his 9th by two wives") was Birth 22. Stephen Hinkley's child ("by Judy Busell out of wedlock") was Birth 39.3

"Birth 50. Birth 51." Two entries crowded into the margin for December 7 provide visual evidence not only of the irregular rhythm of Martha's work but of the expansion of her practice. The fifty-three babies she delivered in 1793 represent an increase of 29 percent over the year before. Old neighbors, new residents, and her own children were contributing to a population expansion that would double the town by the end of the decade.4 Jonathan and Sally's second child, a boy given the patriotic name of DeLafayette, was "Birth 7th" for the year. Peter Jones's baby, born at the mills, was "Birth 15th." The Ballards' new neighbor and dressmaker, Lydia Densmore, produced "Birth 20th."

Fifty-three deliveries a year seems like a comfortable load, even for a part-time practitioner, an average of one case per week. Yet Maine weather and the unpredictability of labor made nonsense of averages. Martha might sit at home for weeks, then do a month's work in forty-eight hours, speeding between one laboring woman and another. She also had to deal, inevitably, with cases of so-called "false labor." One winter day, she hastened downriver to Sheppard's Wharf in a wilderness of snow, taking refuge in the trader's house until Samuel Hussey came to take her across the river to his wife, who was- or had been or at least thought she was- in labor. Martha was patient in such circumstances. Experience had taught her that intermittent labor was a normal part of pregnancy. She sat at the Husseys'

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 168 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

for seven days until a summons from another woman took her back upriver to her own neighborhood. By the time the Hussey delivery began in earnest, the river had thawed, broken up, then frozen again. "Walkt to the Loading place," Martha wrote. "From there Crosst the mountains of ice. Arivd allmost fatagud to death."5

A woman caught between the premonitory tightening in her belly and the feel of snow in the air was suspended between two uncertainties. If she called her midwife, labor might stop; if she did not, she might give birth unattended. In the segment of the diary that opens this chapter, Martha recorded four trips to the Parker house before that reluctant baby -Birth 51 for the year- arrived. "His Lady is about house," she wrote on the fourth day of her third visit. The condition of the river compounded the risk of going home. Martha settled into her knitting, producing two pairs of gloves and five and a half pairs of mittens before being called away, at two in the morning, by Mrs. White, who lived two miles away by sleigh. That was the signal for the Parker baby. Martha performed two deliveries in twenty-four hours, without sleep, walking home across the river the next day in snow, hail, and rain. "I had a wrestless night by fataug & weting my feet," she wrote. A third of the year's deliveries came in such strenuous clusters of two or three.

Martha numbered births the way she weighed candies or counted cabbages or mittens, but with even more intensity and seriousness. Numbers were a measure of productivity, though in the moral sense of diligence, of mastery of a chosen task, rather than in the mercantile sense of income or outgo. She didn't isolate births from the other activities in the diary, but she did give them precedence. Despite their ragged appearance, the birth entries were carefully structured and remarkably consistent. The left margin invariably included the father's surname, the sex of the child, and an XX for fee paid; the right gave the location of the birth and its number. The body of each entry offered additional detail, usually the exact time of delivery ("9 hour 30 minutes"), the hour of her summons or departure ("I left his Lady at 4 pm"), the condition of the mother and child

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 169 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

("as well as Could be Expected"), and the method of travel ("walkt over the river"). In addition some entries included the form or amount of payment ("Receivd 7/6 as a reward"), the names of the attendants ("Mrss Cleark, Duttun, Sewall & myself"), and comments on unusual occurrences at birth ("Doct Page was Calld before my arival").

Individual entries may seem flat and unrevealing. Taken together, they provide an unparalleled record of an eighteenthcentury practice. Even the most routine and formulaic pieces of information are useful. Rare comments on obstetrical complications mean more when seen in relation to hundreds of bland notations that say simply "delivered" or "safe delivered"; a twenty-four-shilling fee acquires new significance when framed with all those other entries recording six shillings or a plain XX, while the appearance of a doctor at a delivery becomes more noteworthy when the hundreds of other deliveries in which no one thought to call a physician are considered. In midwifery as in so many other aspects of Martha Ballard's diary, it is the combination of boredom and heroism, of the usual and the unusual, that tells the story.

In medical terms the success of Martha Ballard's practice is conveyed in what she didn't write. For 768 of the 814 delivery entries in the diary she included no medical detail at all, simply noting "delivered" or "safe delivered," sometimes with an additional reassurance such as "left My patients very well." In only forty-six deliveries, 5.6 percent of all the births in the diary, did she give any hint of complications. Even then she seldom elaborated. A woman was "safe delivered tho very ill indeed" or "Her case was some alarming but shee revivd and seems comfortable." In a particularly difficult case she might add a special thanks: "She had a Laborious illness but Blessed be God it terminated in safety. May shee and I ascribe the prais to the Great parent of the universe."6

Such a record is exactly what one might expect of a skilled practitioner. One medical historian has estimated that 96 percent

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 170 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

of all births occur naturally and spontaneously. The remaining 4 percent involve obstructions of some kind and require intervention. In addition, 1 percent may result in accessory complications, fainting, vomiting, tearing of the perineum, or life-threatening hemorrhages or convulsions. The eighteenthcentury English physician Charles White was not far wrong when he said that a healthy young woman might deliver unattended in the middle of the town common and still do well.7 As twentieth-century reformers insist, birth is a natural process, not a medical event.

Yet, as Martha would be quick to add, a natural process might still be uncomfortable and frightening, and when mismanaged even a normal birth could be dangerous. Like most of her contemporaries, she feared unattended birth.8 She fretted when a missing horse delayed her response to a call. "My anxiety was great for the woman but I found her Safe," she wrote after one such event. On other occasions she was not so positive. Unattended women were "in a deplorable condition" or "suffering for want of help."9 To her mind, those frenzied journeys and patient watchings mattered.

Her results attest to her skill. Her comment on August 20, 1787, that the death of Susanna Clayton and her infant was the "first such instance I ever saw & the first woman that died in Child bed which I delivered" allows us to add the 177 prediary deliveries to the total: in almost 1,000 births Martha did not lose a single mother at delivery, and only five of her patients (including Mrs. Clayton) died in the lying-in period. Infant deaths were also rare. The diary records fourteen stillbirths in 814 deliveries and an additional five infant deaths within an hour or two of delivery.

By our standards, mortality was high. Martha saw one maternal death for every 198 living births. Today that rate is one per 10,000. But as late as 1930, there was one maternal death for every 150 births in the United States; the major gains in obstetrical safety have come in the past fifty years. In fact, many historians believe that the routine employment of physicians in the nineteenth century probably increased rather than decreased

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 171 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

TABLE IV   SUMMARY OF DELIVERY DATA FROM TWO MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

   
Martha Ballard
1785-1812
James Farrington
1824-1859
Deliveries    
  Total Recorded
814
1233
  Average per year
33
35
"Difficult" Births    
  number
46
246*
  percent of total
5.6%
20%
Stillbirths    
  number
14

36

  ratio to live births 1.8/100 3.0/100
Neonatal Deaths   ?
  number 20  
  ratio to live births 2.5/100  
Maternal Deaths    
  total 5 5
  at delivery 0 4
  within two weeks 5 1
ratio to live births 5/1000 4/1000

*James Farrington categorized the 20% of births listed as something other than "natural" labor, as follows: "tedious" (102); "premature" (41); "Preternatural"(39); "complicated"(33); and [after 1838] "instrumental" (31).

SOURCES: Martha Moore Ballard Diary, 1785-1812, MS, Maine State Library, Augusta, Maine; and James Farrington Medical Record Books, 1824-1859, MS, Special Collections, Dimond Library, University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H.

mortality. Records of an early-nineteenth-century New Hampshire physician, whose case load was almost identical to Martha Ballard's, shows higher stillbirth ratios and four maternal deaths at delivery, though only one during the lying-in period (see Table IV). What is even more striking is the large number of complications recorded in his records: 20 percent of his deliveries (as opposed to 5.6 percent for her). The difference was partly in perception- as a physician he was attuned to biological anomalies in a way that she was not- yet there is good

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 172 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

evidence that birth had become a more complex process in the nineteenth century, as physicians began to employ ergot, opiates, and forceps in what Martha Ballard would have considered routine deliveries. Those dangers did not decrease as hospital delivery became more common. A study of a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hospital found stillbirth rates in the second decade of the twentieth century five times as high as Martha's.10

 The more appropriate comparison, of course, is with her own contemporaries. Estimates based on parish registers for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English villages range from ten to twenty-nine maternal deaths per thousand births. In some eighteenth-century London and Dublin hospitals, maternal mortality ranged from 30 to 200(!) per thousand births, compared with 5 per 1,000 for Martha (see Table V).11 There are few comparable New England records, though such as there are suggest that maternal mortality, like other forms, was lower in rural America. Lydia Baldwin, an eighteenth-century Vermont midwife, claimed only one maternal death in 926 deliveries, though the lack of detail in her records makes it impossible to determine whether she included deaths in the lying-in period as well as deaths at delivery. Hall Jackson, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, physician claimed no maternal deaths in 511 births, though again his records are sketchy. Martha's stillbirth ratios are comparable to (though slightly lower than) both Baldwin's and Jackson's12 (see Table VI).

 Martha's obstetrical entries were routine and predictable because most deliveries were routine and predictable. The terseness of her records also reflects a traditional reticence about the details of sex and birth. Martha's patients were not anonymous bodies but friends and neighbors. She was no prude, yet she was probably unaccustomed to saying, let alone writing, all she knew and saw. Even among publishing physicians a certain reserve was expected. The author of one English midwifery manual defended the lack of anatomical detail in his text on the grounds that his work was designed not to "give the least Offence to the most modest Reader."13

 Beyond that, the lack of detail reinforces what we already

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 173 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

TABLE V   COMPARATIVE MATERNAL MORTALITY RATES

Place Total
Births
Maternal
Deaths
Deaths per
1000 Births
London A      
   1767 - 1772 653 18 27.5
   1770 63 14 222.2
London B      
   1749 - 1770 1908 196 21.5
   1770 890 35 39.3
London C      
   1747 - "present" 4758 93 19.5
   1771 282 10 35.4
London D 790 6 7.5
Dublin A      
   1745 - 1754 3206 29 9.0
Dublin B      
   1757 - 1775 10726 152 14.1
   1768 633 17 26.8
   1770 616 5 8.1
Martha Ballard      
   1777 - 1812 998 5 5.0
   1785 - 1812 814 5 6.1
United States      
   1930     6.7
   1935     5.8
   1940     3.8
   1945    

2.1

SOURCES: Charles White, A Treatise on the Management of Pregnant and Lying-in Women, Worcester, Mass., 1793); Martha Moore Ballard Diary, 2 vols., MS, Maine State Library, Augusta,, Maine; Maternal and Child Health Practices: Problems, Resources and Methods of Delivery, ed. Helen M. Wallace, Edwin M. Gold, and Edward F. Lis (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1973), P. 285.

know about her craft, that it was traditional rather than experimental. Unlike the publishing physicians of the period, some of whom kept obstetrical case notes, she had no interest in instructing others (at least through the written word) or in testing

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 174 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

TABLE VI   COMPARATIVE STILLBIRTH RATES

  Total
Births
Total
Stillbirths
Stillbirths per
100 Live Births
Martha Ballard
1785 - 1812
814 14 1.8
Hall Jackson
1775 - 1794
511 12 2.4
James Farrington
1824 - 1859
1233 36 3.0
Portsmouth, N.H.
1809 - 1810
541 14 2.7
Marblehead, Mass.
1808
222 7 3.3
Exeter, N.H.
1809
53 1 1.9
United States*
1942
    2.0

*Fetal death ratio, defined as fetal deaths of 28 weeks or more gestation per 1,000 live births.

SOURCES: Martha Moore Ballard Diary, 2 vols., MS, Maine State Library, Augusta, Maine; J. Worth Estes, Hall Jackson and the Purple Foxglove: Medical Practice and Research in Revolutionary America, 1760-1820 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1979), p. 120; James Farrington Medical Record Books, 1824-1859, MS, Special Collections, Dimond Library, University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H.; Lyman Spalding, Bill of Mortality for Portsmouth, broadside [Portsmouth: 1809, 1810); John Drury, Bill of Mortality for Marblehead, 1808, broadside (Marblehead, 1808); Joseph Tilton, M.D., Bill of Mortality for Exeter, New Hampshire, broadside ([Exeter: 1809]); Helen M. Wallace, "Factors Associated with Perinatal Mortality and Morbidity," in Maternal and Child Health Practices: Problems, Resources and Methods of Delivery, ed. Helen M. Wallace, Edwin M. Gold, and Edward F. Lis (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1973), p. 507.

and promoting new methods. Her training was manual rather than literary. Having mastered her craft she had no need to explain it. Although the outcome of each delivery mattered (it was important to note whether a woman who had been "very

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 175 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

ill" was now "comfortable"), the process was of little consequence. Furthermore, the cultural setting of the work discouraged a technical presentation of the result.

 Excessive bleeding was "flooding" in her diary as in the obstetrical literature, but she did not use Latinisms like matrix and vagina or technical terms like Os Pubis and Os Tincae. In fact, what is most striking is the absence of any reference to the explicit processes of birth. Her women are seldom even in "travail." They are simply "unwell," and as the delivery proceeds it is their "illness" rather than their "bearing pains" or even their "labor" that increases. Where an English midwife might "touch" a woman (a euphemism for an internal examination), Martha "inquired into her case." Once in a while she refers to a presentation as preternatural as a physician might, but her designation of one woman's labor as supernatural was surely a slip of the pen.14

 Her reference to the encounter with Dr. Page at Mrs. Poor's delivery in the November 17 passage is a case in point. In the context of the larger history of obstetrics, it is also extraordinarily interesting. "I Extracted the Child," she wrote. "He Chose to Close the Loin." The language is almost Biblical in its circumlocution. Presumably she meant that Dr. Page had delivered the placenta or afterbirth and then applied the traditional bandages around the abdomen and thighs. Because the delivery of the placenta was a source of some controversy in the period, the incident is worth examining in detail.

 Early-eighteenth-century advice books urged the immediate extraction of the placenta, even if it meant reaching into the womb. "With my left hand I was oblig'd to keep her Belly down," wrote one English midwife, "whilst with my right hand I peel'd off and loosen'd the secundines from the Matrix." Many physicians promoted similar methods, arguing that if there was room for a baby in the womb there was certainly room for a hand. No one advised rough pulling on the umbilicus, however, a method usually attributed to "ignorant midwives." By the last quarter of the eighteenth century a few physicians claimed that doing nothing was the best approach of all. "Nature does

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 176 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

more of this work than art can do, both for the Mother and child," wrote William Hunter, "and therefore no art should be used."15

 Martha Ballard's silence on the subject suggests that she was quite comfortable with Dr. Page's method, whatever it was, yet his insistence on "Clos[ing] the Loin" may suggest his own mistrust of her skill. The word "Close" is itself suggestive, since in the form of a noun it denoted the wrapper or binding applied to the abdomen and thighs after birth. William Hunter described the process this way: "As [the placenta] comes away I know it will be followed by a suction of air. On this account as it comes out I close the Vulva, and keep my hands on the parts below. Then I call for a bason, and give it [the placenta] away and apply a dry warm cloth to the Vulva.... After this I apply several cloths & then ask for what is called the close. I keep the parts close with my hands, and then take out one cloth and apply it over them dry. I take another and put it about her thighs etc. I give her another to put over her stomach and belly."16

 Hunter recommended plain dry cloths, apparently rather loosely applied. Older writers suggested tying the knees together after applying a large, soft, dry double clout "very warm to the Labia Pudendi." Regardless of method, the phrase "Close the Loin" suggests a kind of intimacy, a physical caring that was more often associated with midwifery and nursing than with medicine in this period. It was not simply a matter of guiding an attending nurse in the application of the "clouts." The extraction of the placenta and the "closing" of the vulva were parts of one operation, the "suction of air" to be followed by a kind of capping of the parts. There was a strong belief in the period that allowing an ingress of air into the birth canal after delivery would cause afterpains and inflammation of the womb.17

 According to the diary, Dr. Page "Chose to Close the Loin." The implication of intent is suggestive. Martha used the verb "to choose" in describing a similar encounter in Pittston the year before. She had been called to see the wife of Peter Grant,

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 177 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

but the family "had called Doctor Parker before I arived and he seemed to chuse to perform the opperation which took place at 1 hour 11 am."18 The language is not accidental. There was something strangely officious about the behavior of Drs. Page and Parker. Older physicians were content with emergency work or with delivering their near relatives. These men were different. Rather than deferring to the midwife, as would have been proper with one of her age and experience, perhaps remaining in an outer room with the husband in case of emergency, they chose to participate in the routine work of birthing. For Martha Ballard the behavior of Dr. Page was particularly troubling. The young man was not yet twenty-four years old and still unmarried, yet he seemed bent on making midwifery a part of the full-time practice of medicine.19

Her second encounter with Ben Page was more dramatic. She had been sitting up all night with Hannah Sewall, a young bride who had recently arrived in Hallowell from the coastal town of York. (Her husband was another of Henry's cousins.) "They were intimidated," Martha wrote, "& Calld Dr Page who gave my patient 20 drops of Laudanum which put her into such a stupor her pains (which were regular & promising) in a manner stopt till near night when she pukt & they returned & shee delivered at 7 hour Evening of a son her first Born."20 The "intimidation" may have had something to do with the fact that Hannah had grown up in an elite family in a coastal town and was already familiar with medical delivery. Dr. Page's behavior, however, can only be attributed to inexperience. English obstetrical literature recommended the use of opiates for false pains but not for genuine labor; he was apparently having difficulty telling one from the other. Martha's characterization of the pains as "regular" suggests she may have been using her timepiece to monitor the contractions. That she pronounced them "promising" suggests she had conducted an internal examination (or "touch") to check the dilation, though we cannot be sure. Perhaps her measurement of the pains was merely impressionistic; she had sat through enough "lingering" labors to know productive pains from spurious ones.

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 178 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

  Thereafter she was unmerciful in reporting Dr. Page's mistakes. "Sally Cocks went to see Mrs Kimball," she wrote. "Shee was delivered of a dead daughter on the morning of the 9th instant, the operation performed by Ben Page. The infants limbs were much dislocated as I am informed." She even questioned his judgment on nonobstetrical matters. Called to examine an infant's rupture, she recommended the application of brandy. "They inform me that Dr Page says it must be opined, which I should think improper from present appearance," she wrote. Dr. Page must have had some success or patients would not have been willing to call him, yet some part of his ability to enter the practice was due to the high birth rate in the town, to Martha's own heavy schedule, and to Dr. Cony's frequent absences. Henry Sewall even called him once "in Mrs. Ballard's absence," but fortunately it was a false alarm and Martha was able to perform the delivery. In June of 1798, while Martha was engaged with another case, Page again delivered a stillborn child . Her report was blunt: "The wife of James Bridg was delivered this morn at 1 hour of a son. It was Born dead and is to be interd this Evening. Doctor Page was operator. Poor unfortunate man in the practice." Perhaps this misadventure induced some humility. A month later Martha again found "a patient in the hands of Doctor Page," but this time "he gave the Case up to me and she was (after I removd obstructions) safe delivered."21

Benjamin Page was unfortunate, but he was also ill prepared and overly confident. Martha's reference to his dislocation of an infant's limbs suggests lack of familiarity with the difficult manual operation required in breech births. The English midwife Sarah Stone warned against such "boyish Pretenders," who, having attended a few dissections and read the major treatises, pretended to understand the manipulative arts so important to midwifery. Even Henry Bracken, an English accoucheur who insisted that midwives call in a doctor in difficult births, cautioned, "I would never advise any one to employ a young physician."22

Still, Ben Page had certain advantages: a gentlemanly bearing, a successfully completed apprenticeship, and credit with certain

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 179 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

younger members of the Kennebec elite. His list of patients is impressive. Benjamin Poor was a printer and eventually the publisher of Hallowell's first newspaper, his wife a schoolteacher. David Sewall was a merchant, his wife the daughter of one of York's first families, and the sister of Sally Keating Wood, Maine's first novelist. James Bridge was a Harvard graduate, attorney, and eventual judge of Probate for Kennebec County. Significantly, his wife was Hannah North, the judge's daughter. All three husbands were, like Benjamin Page, ambitious, educated, and new to the town. Furthermore, they could afford a physician's fee. (In the early 18oos, when Martha Ballard was charging under $2 for a delivery, Page was collecting $6.)23

We should not conclude, however, that Hallowell's elite families were abandoning traditional delivery en masse. Whether status is determined by position on the tax list, by education, or by election to public office, Hallowell's "elite" were as likely as ordinary families to employ Martha Ballard. To the end of the century she performed two-thirds of the deliveries in the town, whether the babies were the children or grandchildren of public officials and merchants or of ordinary timbermen and farmers. Ten of the twelve wealthiest men on the tax list for 1790 are known to have had children or grandchildren born before 1800. Martha performed deliveries for eight. Of twenty-five men who held town, county, or state office between 1785 and 1796, nineteen are known to have had children or grandchildren born before 1800 She performed deliveries for fourteen. The exceptions are predictable. In addition to Colonel North and his son-in-law James Bridges, they include Daniel Cony, who delivered his own children, and Beriah Ingraham, whose wife or mother ("Old Lady lngraham") was a midwife.24

Several of the more prominent Hallowell families employed Martha Ballard. She delivered two of Supply Belcher's children before his removal to Farmington in 1794. Known to contemporaries as the "Handel of Maine," he published a collection of compositions in 1794. Sarah Sheppard, whose husband was Charles Vaughan's agent at the Hook, was also one of Martha's

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 180 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

patients. (Mrs. Sheppard had the distinction of owning a piano.)25 There were others. About ten days after Martha's encounter with Dr. Page at the delivery of Hannah Sewall, she was called to the home of Chandler Robbins, a Harvard graduate and new resident of the town. "Mrs Robbins Linguerd till 4 hour pm when her illness came on," she wrote, adding, "Doctor Parker was Calld but shee did not wish to see him when he Came & he returned home." In childbirth, the ultimate decision still rested with the mother. Martha noted, without comment, that Mr. Robbins had given her eighteen shillings, three times her usual fee.26

In the diary, the transition to medical obstetrics is a far more complex process that it appears in secondary literature. Historians have attributed the rise of "male-midwifery" in England and America to two factors, fashion and forceps. Forceps capable of delivering a living child were a humane alternative to the crude techniques of barber surgeons called in to save a mother's life by dismembering her child. Midwives and physicians both assailed the frequent use of "the Hook and the Knife," describing "Infants born crying, with their Brains working out of their Heads" and mothers dying "under the Hands of the Operator after some of the Limbs and Ribs of the Child were brought away."27 In fact Benjamin Page's mentor, Dr. Thomas Kittredge of Andover, Massachusetts, owned forceps and the medical treatises that promoted their use.28

 Yet instruments can hardly explain the introduction of malemidwifery in a town with so few emergency births. Martha Ballard summoned a physician twice in twenty-seven years, once in the first year of the diary, when she arrived late to a delivery and found the patient "greatly ingered by some mishap" by an inexperienced midwife, though the woman did "not allow that shee was sencible of it." Significantly, she sent for Dr. Colman, a doctor who did not perform deliveries, to deal with what was by then a medical emergency. Although Colman was unavailable, "Dr. Williams fortunately Come in & prescribed remidies which aford some relief." The mother apparently survived.29

 The description of the second case is more expansive. "My patients illness Came on at 8 hour morning," Martha wrote.

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 181 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Her women were Calld, her Case was Lingering till 7 pm I removd difuculties & waited for Natures opperations till then, when shee was more severly attackt with obstructions which alarmed me much. I desird Doctor Hubard might be sent for which request was Complid with, but by Divine assistance I performed the oppration, which was blisst with the preservation of the lives off mother and infant. The life of the latter I dispard off for some time.

In the margin of that day's entry she wrote, "The most perelous sien I Ever past thro in the Course of my practice. Blessed be God for his goodness."30

Martha was frightened by this "perelous sien," but her ability to negotiate it alone may have increased her confidence. Never again did she feel it necessary to summon a physician. She certainly encountered her share of breech births, obstructions, and fainting mothers, but she knew what to do. "The foets [fetus] was in an unnatural posetion but I Brot it into a proper direction and shee was safe delivered," she reported calmly after one difficult birth, and following another she wrote, "There were some obstructions to remove. When performd the patient was safe delivered." Her nondescript entries are a quiet corrective to eighteenth-century obstetrical manuals, which are filled with the horrors of birth, babies lodged in the birth canal or stuck crosswise in the pelvis, mothers bleeding to death or succumbing from putrefying tissue left in the womb. "[She] was Exercised with pain & fainting after delivery," Martha summarized. "I made use of Camphor & other remedies. Shee revivd & I left her & Child Cleverly."31

The construction of the last sentence is pleasingly ambiguous. In some English dialects to leave a person "Cleverly" meant to leave them in health. That was certainly the intended meaning of Martha's statement. Yet leaving a mother and child "Cleverly" also meant applying one's own adroitness and dexterity. A midwife's skill was mirrored in her patients' well-being. Typically, Martha gave God the credit for her success, but she knew that He had worked His will through her hands.

Without seeming to do so she compared her own record with

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 182 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

those of her peers, working into the diary hearsay evidence of difficult births that occurred outside her practice. "Mr George Brown informd me that Capt Smiths wife had 2 Children Born Last night. They are dead," she wrote. In this case the practitioner may have been Mrs. Hinkley, who is known to have delivered another of Captain Smith's children. Sometime later Martha noted that Mrs. Hartford had been "delivered of two Dead Babes by Esquire Cony this morning, one of each sex.32 Behind these statements is her own quiet awareness that she herself had never lost a pair of twins. She reported multiple births as though they were as ordinary as any others: "I was calld in haste at 11 hour Eveing to Mr Isaac Clearks Lady in travil. Shee was safe delivered of a fine son & a daughter before 12. All likely to do well."33

A statistical comparison between Martha Ballard and her competitors is something of an anachronism, however, as is an effort to isolate and categorize her delivery techniques. She simply did not see her work in that way. In fact, the most descriptive account of the birth of twins in her diary says almost as much about her own journey as the delivery itself. Mrs. Byrnes

was seizd with her illness very severe about noon, calld her women a little before sun sett and shee was safe delivered of Two Daughters before 8 hour Evening. There was but a short space between the Births. They are fine Children. May God long preserv them. I sett up with my Patients, Mrs Conry and Benn White's wife allso. It was a very Cold night. I was Calld to Mrs Byrns yesterday. Mr Ballard & Dingley broke thro the ice and got me over the river. I was fatagud in Climbing the bank on the other side. Mr Dingley & Graves assisted me.34

Characteristically, the one obstetrical comment in the entry ("There was but a short space between the Births") is embedded in seemingly extraneous references to the weather, her journey, the names of the men who assisted her across the river and of the women who sat up with her through the night. The biolog-

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 183 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

ical event fades into the clutter of social detail. Where is the center of the picture? Is it Martha Ballard scrambling up the icy bank, Mr. Dingley grasping one arm, Mr. Graves reaching toward her from above, while Ephraim slowly turns his boat in the ice-rimmed river below? Is it Mrs. Byrnes, exhausted from her eight-hour labor, bearing down for the second delivery? Is it Mrs. Conry easing two perfect babies into the cradle, or the three drowsy women leaning toward the kitchen fire, the midnight cold at their backs, small clouds of mist above their whispers?

There is no center, only a kind of grid, faint trails of experience converging and deflecting across a single day.

A description of childbirth taken from Martha Ballard's diary could not include anything so precise as the dilation of the cervix or the extraction of the afterbirth. Nor would it focus on the three stages of labor easily recognizable to twentieth-century women in the eighteenth-century distinction between "grinding or preparing pains," "forcing pains," and "grumbling pains." The diary description would have three stages, but they would be defined in social rather than biological terms, each marked by the summons and arrival of attendants-first the midwife, then the neighborhood circle of women, finally the afternurse. Parturition ended when the mother returned to her kitchen.

The first stage of delivery lasted from several hours to several days and at first might not even be accompanied by genuine labor. The expectation of labor was enough. "I helpt Mrs Lithgow make Cake & Pies & knit on my Stockin," Martha wrote two days after her arrival at Esquire Lithgow's in Winslow. The long distance necessitated the early summons, but Mrs. Lithgow was not far wrong in her estimation, as the next day's entry attests: "I finisht my stockin. My patient was unwell all day." She was delivered at ten the following night of a "fine son."35 Whether she was actually in labor the whole time or only uncomfortable and anxious, we do not know. The important thing is that her midwife was there and willing to stay.

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 184 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

  Most women stayed on their feet as long as they could during this stage of delivery, working as able, resting as necessary, Mrs. Thwing "Capt [kept] Chamber all day" before her third delivery." Mrs. Walker "was sprigh about house till 11, was safe delivered at 12 hour & 15 minutes of a fine Son." (Martha had arrived early that morning.) "By turns" Mrs. Lathrop was "able to work till near sunset when she was more unwell." Martha measured the intensity of labor by her own ability to work or sleep. "Find the patient some what ill but I had op[portunity] to take rest by sleep," she wrote, and during another labor, "I sett up the most of the night. Shee seemd very Comfortable towards day and I took sleep." She was patient but watchful during this period, sometimes even sharing a bed with her patient.36

Martha probably administered herbal remedies and perhaps even mixtures laced with wine or rum, though the only explicit references to alcohol during labor suggest dismay at the women's capacity for drink. At William Chamberlain's house: "My patient is not very well. We find shee has an inclination to drink rhum. She drank about one quart. Her illness increast ... was delivered at 3 hour morn of a son her first child." And a week later at another house: "At Mr Catons yet. His wife is not fitt to be left. He went to the river. Shee wisht to Drink wine and Eat Bisquit. He procured it and shee Drank Eleven glasses this day and Eat Bisquit and wine at Evening 3 times." The next day she was delivered "of a son at 2 hours 30 minutes pm and of a daughter at 3 hour pm ... I could not sleep for flees."37 In both cases Martha attributed the inclination to drink to the mother herself, though she may have approved an effort to relax and partially sedate a patient who was experiencing lackadaisical and not very productive labor.

The transition from the first to the second stage of delivery was marked by the calling of "the women." Here too there were occasional disappointments -"the women went home Except her Sister Blanchard"- but generally the arrival of the women signaled the imminence of birth. The calling of the women may have marked a biological transition. In normal labor the

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 185 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

full dilation of the cervix brings the onset of what eighteenth century practitioners called "forcing" or "bearing" pains, the active stage of labor in which the mother, coached by her midwife, assisted in expelling the child. Martha Ballard explicitly linked a new intensity of labor with the summoning of the neighbors, writing that one woman's "illness Came on so great that her women were Calld" or that another "was not so ill as to call in other assistance this day."38

There were practical reasons for delaying the call, there being no good reason why five or six women should share the passive watching and waiting that accompanied the early hours of labor. Once the second stage of labor began, however, additional women were needed. Most early American women literally gave birth in the arms or on the laps of their neighbors. The physical equipment for delivery was very simple. As Henry Bracken explained it, "Some Midwives use a particular Kind of Stool, and others a Pallet-Bed with only a double Quilt upon it, placed near the Fire, if the Season require," though with "a little Alteration of the Clothes" a mother's own bed "or a Woman's Knee" would do.39 Though a Vermont midwife who practiced during this period is said to have owned a birthing stool, there is no evidence that Martha Ballard had one. The diary alludes to a "time piece," "medicines," and "specktakles," all in connection with midwifery journeys, but never once does it mention a stool, a piece of equipment that surely would have added complexity to her scrambles up the ice-covered banks of the Kennebec. "The women" are the most obvious piece of equipment in the diary.

Whether her patients reclined, crouched, knelt, or delivered upright, Martha required at least two assistants.40 "Find his mother and Ben Churches wife there. We calld the McCausland wives after Sunsett."41 Eighty percent of the entries that offer names mention between two and four women. One entry (perhaps incomplete) lists a single assistant; the remainder, five or more. "My company were Old Lady Cox, Pitts, Sister Barton, Moody, Soal, & Witherel," Martha wrote, omitting the usual formality of "Mrs" in her tumble of names. Listing the ten as-

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 186 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

sistants at Jeremiah White's house was equally confusing: "Mrs White sent for her women. They were with her all night, Viz. old Mrs White, Norcross, Moses & Benn Whites wives, Jackso son, Stickney, Coburn, & Lydia his sister."42

Although a few women, like Merriam Pollard, seem to have been drawn beyond the circle of their own neighborhoods, most birth attendants, except for relatives, lived nearby. Some young mothers delivered at their parents' houses, others summoned their "marm" or sisters from afar; but nearly everyone relied on neighbors. There is a striking correspondence between the names on Martha's lists and known residence patterns in the town. The Mrs. Sewall who appeared at Martha Molloy's delivery on November 18, 1793, was probably not Tabitha, who lived a considerable distance away, but Ruth, the wife of Henry's cousin Moses. She and Mrs. Dutton lived near the Molloys at the Hook. Tabitha Sewall may well have been present a few weeks later, at the delivery of her neighbor, Mrs. Parker (though a little later there would be an estrangement that would prevent that kind of intimacy). When Tabitha Sewall delivered her fourth child, the attendants included Mrs. Parker, Mrs. Vose, and another near neighbor, Susanna Cony Howard Brooks.43

The attending women offered emotional as well as physical support. After two days of intermittent labor, "Mrs Coin [Cowen] was Lingering and very much deprist in Spirits. We called Mrs Fletcher. Mrs Soal Called there. Mrs Savage & Fletcher tarried all night." The patient was delivered a few hours later "with 5 pains after my inquiring into her Case."44 The women helped to dress the infant and to lift the mother in (or out) of bed. Performing their simple duties, they no doubt traded stories, measuring one woman's pains--or the size of her child-against another's. George Thomas's son "weighed more than the lite side of Mr Densmore's stilyards would weigh"; Captain Ney's baby "measured round the Breast (after being 'drest in thin Cloaths) 18 1/2 inches." In contrast, Hannah Getchel's illegitimate child was "the smallist I ever saw alive." (It died the next day.)45

In one birth out of twenty-four, the child died. Of these, forty

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 187 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

percent were stillborn; the rest died in the first day of life. When the delivery was abnormal, Martha searched for causes: "Shee had a fall not long since which probably was the cause," or "I know not what to ascribe the death of the infant to but the cough the Mother had." One infant "survivd about an hour and Expird without any aparant distress. It seemd to be struck with a mortification," Martha wrote.46 In such circumstances it was comforting to have the women with her; they could witness her efforts to ensure a safe delivery and they could assist with the sorrowful task of preparing the infant for burial.

The presence of the women was even more important in cases of illegitimacy. "At Benjamin White's with his Sister Rebeckah who is in Travel tho unmarried," she wrote on December 21 1787, noting that Becky's women were with her when she declared Seth Partridge to be the father of her child. In the most sensational case of her career, Martha was especially careful about noting the presence-or absence-of witnesses. Sally Ballard's sister Mehettable Pierce declared that her child "was begoten by John Varsal Davis, Esquire. This shee positively affirm[ed] in the presence of the wife of Jonathan Ballard who with Hosea Houland were my assistants in the case. The latter was stept in to an other room when I Examined my Patient," Martha explained, adding that they had also summoned Mrs. Titcomb, who "did not arive till after the Birth." Davis came to see the mother and child that afternoon, whether on a cordial visit or to determine whether Hitty had remained true to her accusation, we do not know. Davis, a Plymouth Company heir and clerk of the country court, was not disposed to marry the mother, but he seems to have paid child support until the baby died at the age of three (see Chapter 7).47

Martha was not summoned, however, to what may have been an even more sensational delivery. On August 29, 1795, Henry Sewall reported in his diary that "last night Charlotte Cool, who lives in character of Household Servant, gave birth to a second bastard child at Peter Parkers, said to be by Colo. Wm. H---d." For Sewall, there must have been great satisfaction in the event. Mrs. Parker, the woman whom Martha delivered in December

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 188 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

of 1793, had earlier sued him before Judge North for slander. Sewall had apparently spread, though not originated, rumors about her (or her maid's?) alliance with Colonel Howard.48 As usual, the details are missing, but the underlying issue -the Colonel's behavior- seems clear. It was one thing for young couples to have a child born too soon after marriage, another for public officials like Howard and Davis to flout local norms. But what was one to do unless the women themselves were willing to confront the men? Hitty Pierce sued John Davis, but as far as we know, Charlotte Cool made no effort to prosecute Howard.49

Traditionally, the attending women at a delivery joined in a celebration afterward ("the Ladies who assisted took supper after all our matters were completed"), sometimes staying the night if there was room in the house or the weather was bad ("took a nap by the fire after midnight. Her women all tarried"). There would be a clutter of beds in the kitchen and chambers as the women fitted into the niches of an already crowded household. "There were 22 in number slept under that roof the night," Martha reported after one delivery, including in her count the children and hired helpers and visiting relatives as well as the attending neighbors. Some women could afford an it "elligant dinner" for their women; others sent their midwife home searching her clothes for fleas. There was piety in some households ("We all took some repose ... took Breakfast and afterwards attended prayers"), confusion in others ("his mother had fitts after [the] delivery. I attended in Each room and left all cleverly"). At the house of Scip Moody, one of Hallowell's free blacks, there was more neighborly concern than space. "I tarried all night, Mrs Cain & Ben White's wife allso," Martha wrote. "We had no where to sleep so we sett up."50

During another all-night vigil, Martha herself became the patient. "I had a severe Cramp in my Limbs in the night ... the Ladies who were there used me with great kindness."51 Perhaps there was a kind of pleasure in nursing the friend who had so often cared for them.

The third stage of birth -the lying-in period- began with

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 189 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

the arrival of the afternurse and the departure of the midwife. In her entry for December 8, 1793, Martha made the connection explicit: "Mr Parker went for his Nurs. I left his Lady at 4 pm." Barring unforeseen complications, she would not return. Mrs. Parker made an uneventful recovery, though six weeks later she called Martha back to see her infant, who seemed unwell. Her husband used this occasion to pay Martha. A few days later, when she was in the neighborhood delivering another baby, she again "Calld at Mr Parkers," noting that "her infant is better."52 Postpartum checkups, like prenatal care, were unusual. Return visits occurred if the mother or infant was unwell or if Martha Ballard happened to be in the neighborhood and made a courtesy call.

For this reason the diary tells us less about the postpartum period than about delivery itself. The few descriptions that survive suggest that the term "lying-in" was a misnomer. Most women spent very little time in bed. Even in the first hours after delivery, mothers were not allowed to languish. "Got my patient up, Changd her lining [linen] and came home," Martha wrote, in this case twelve hours after delivery, or "help[ed] Mrs William up & maid her Bed and returned home." Commenting on a casual visit to another patient, Martha described what must have been the normal process of recovery. Six days after delivery Martha found Mrs. Joy "down in her kitchen. Shee Came out of her Chamber yesterday. Shee informs me that shee has made her Bed this three days. Her infant is finely."53 It wasn't the size and position of the woman's uterus but her ability to make her own bed that signified recovery. Mrs. Joy may have been a day or two ahead of schedule. Under normal circumstances a woman "kept chamber" for a week, gradually assuming responsibility for the care of her infant and her own surroundings until she was able to "return to the kitchen," a ubiquitous and apt description for the end of lying-in.

The length of convalescence depended upon the economic circumstances as well as the physical condition of the mother. As the birth entries make clear, the range of resources and of housekeeping skills among Martha's patients varied widely.

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 190 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Elite women could obviously afford a more leisured and orderly lying-in. Henry Sewall reported that Tabitha "got below" three weeks after the delivery of her seventh child. With a toddler and three other children to care for as well as the infant, she was probably happy to delay her emergence as long as possible. This time she had been fortunate in engaging Mrs. Conner, the most sought-after of the local afternurses. In comparison, Isaac Hardin's wife hardly paused after delivery to catch her breath. "I am informd that Mrs Hardin wove 1 1/2 yards this day & 3 the next," Martha wrote in the margin of her entry for March 12, 1794. The baby had arrived three days before.

For many Maine women, as for their English counterparts, alcoholic drinks were a part of lying-in. A store manager in another part of Maine wrote his employer, "The women in these parts have been very fruitfull this winter and had I not assisted many of them with tea, sugar, rum &c in their lyings in I do not know what would have become of them, for they seem destitute, of all comforts, and their husbands are to repay in labour." Two days after her niece Pamela Porter was delivered, Martha sent her the same list of commodities, minus the tea. The continuous caution of the prescriptive literature against the use of "strong spiritous liquors" during lying-in reinforces the evidence. The concern of some authors was that strong beverages would induce fevers by adding heat to the body. Thin water gruel was much better, they insisted, than caudle or thick gruel mixed with liquors.54 Maine women did not agree. Rum, sugar, and tea were necessary comforts for a lying-in.

The scarcest commodity in Hallowell households was not rum, however, but help. As we have seen, the same young women who warped looms and swept kitchens in Hallowell occasionally did nursing ("Parthena gone to nurse Mrs Foot"; "Philip Bullin conducted Becky Fought to his brothers as nurse after birth"). Few of these young nurses could stay long, most having other obligations to their families or employers. After one of her own daughters delivered, Martha noted that Debby Low had come and gone in a day and that the mother had no help except for her sister, who had brought her two young chil-

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 191 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

dren with her and another baby as well. Under such circumstances, getting well was a woman's best defense.55

 There were a few older women who specialized in nursing, and those who could afford them were fortunate. Martha Ballard and Henry Sewall both mentioned Mrs. Conry or Conner. Since neither surname appeared on either the 1790 or 1800 census for Hallowell, Augusta, or other nearby towns, she may have been a widow living as a dependent in a daughter's or sister's house. Mrs. Vose, probably the wife or mother of one of the men by that name in the town, also did nursing, as did Mrs. Stone. Nurses were probably paid less than midwives, though in some families, at least, they inherited the traditional place of honor at an infant's baptism. At the baptism of one of the Reverend Mr. Foster's children, "Mrs Vose carried it." Henry Sewall gave Mrs. Conner the same honor when his daughter Mary was baptized.56

A successful delivery did not assure the survival of the child, nor did all women pass through the lying-in period without incident. Experienced afternurses could handle the usual complications, though occasionally Martha was called back to administer remedies two or three days after delivery. "Shee had an ill turn. Her milk is Cuming," was the common explanation. There were more exotic complications, of course. Two weeks after a birth, Martha went back to the Norcrosses and "Cleard her infants breasts of milk." Women then as now suffered from afterpains, hemorrhoids, and phlebitis. In thirty-eight of the 481 births between 1785 and 1796, Martha returned to her patients to treat some sort of complication. In thirty-four of these cases, at least one specific symptom is mentioned. Seven women had sore breasts, three experienced fever, two had taken cold, another had contracted a sore throat, five had an "ill turn" when their milk came in, another a severe headache, two experienced unusual weakness, and one had cramp pains a month after delivery. Six days after delivery, Moses Sewall's wife was "Exercisd with a swelling in her Left Legg & Severe pain." In the final case, Martha attributed the postpartum crisis to the misbehavior of a husband.57

"I was called in hast to Mrs. Williams," she wrote, "shee

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 192 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

being in a Deliriam by reason of a mistep of her Husband tho not desiring to injure her. I tarried till 3/0 Clok morn. Left her rationall tho Exercisd with some pain." It is hard to imagine what the young husband had done. Had he administered the wrong medicine? Let the fire go out? Crawled in bed with his wife- or the afternurse? The suddenness of the crisis suggests that an emotional upset rather than a fever had induced the "Deliriam," though we cannot be sure.58

As we have seen, five of Martha's patients died during the lying-in period. One woman was seriously ill with the measles when she gave birth. Another was in convulsions when she delivered a stillborn daughter and was still experiencing "fitts" four days later when she died. She was no doubt a victim of eclampsia, the most severe stage of an acute toxemia of pregnancy, a condition that is still considered one of the gravest complications of childbirth today. The other women may have died of puerperal infection, historically the major cause of deaths in childbed. The infectious quality of puerperal fever was first suggested in the 1840s by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in the United States and Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis in Austria, but the bacteriological nature of the disease was not settled until the 1880s, when Louis Pasteur demonstrated the presence of what is now known as streptococcus in patients suffering from the affliction. Puerperal fever is a wound infection caused by the invasion of the uterine cavity by a number of bacteria, alone or in combination. The patient may feel normal in the first few days after delivery, but then an elevation in temperature, headache, malaise, and pelvic pain signal infection. (With certain strains of bacteria there is a profuse discharge characterized by a peculiarly foul odor.)59

The description of Mrs. Craig's death fits the pattern. She was "safe Delivered of a very fine Daughter" on March 31, 1790. Five days later Martha reported finding her "not so well as I could wish." The midwife returned the next day and administered a "Clister [enema] of milk, water, & salt" and applied an "ointment & a Bath of Tansy, mugwort, Cammomile & Hysop which gave Mrs. Cragg great relief." A week later she was

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 193 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

called back because her patient was "Exceeding ill." Mrs. Craig had taken rhubarb and the bark on her own but had not improved. When a physician was called the next day, he "plainly told the famely Mrs Cragg must die." She expired that evening. Martha helped "put on the grave Cloaths," then stayed with the family the night. "The Corps were Coffined & sett in the west room," she wrote. "Purge & smell very ofensive." Meanwhile, the neighbors came by turns to "give the infant suck."60

Martha attempted no diagnosis in this or in the remaining cases, though infection seems the likely cause. As we have seen, Mrs. Caton died four days after delivery during the scarlet fever epidemic of 1787. The remaining women fell ill a few days after delivery and died two weeks later. What is significant about these five deaths, of course, is their rarity. A woman might experience acute discomfort during lying-in-afterpains, sore nipples, swollen legs, and even "Deliriam"-but few died.

Most women went through delivery every other year, summoning a midwife, calling their women, welcoming the afternurse, returning to their kitchens. For the next year they would breast-feed the newest baby while caring for the older siblings, fitting in work at the loom or in the barn and garden as they could. Some historians have discerned an effort in New England toward the end of the eighteenth century to control family size. There is little evidence of that in Hallowell. Even with incomplete registration, there are more than seven children per family in the town clerk's records. Martha delivered four women of a twelfth, one of a thirteenth, two of a fifteenth, and one of a sixteenth child.

For most women, breast-feeding retarded conception, creating birth intervals that averaged twenty- four months, in Martha Ballard's practice as in most of the western world. Martha was impressed enough to note it when Ezra Hodge's wife delivered her fifth baby just two months after her oldest child turned five, but such feats of fertility were rare.61 The rhythm of childbearing kept the traditional beat. If there was any effort at family limitation, it came toward the end of the childbearing years. In some families, birth intervals grew further apart; in a few, deliv-

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 194 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

eries stopped abruptly. Tabitha Sewall had eight children in fourteen years and then quit bearing. But the effect on the town's fertility was slight. Not even widowhood could retard Susanna Cony Howard Brooks. She produced eight children in sixteen years of marriage to three different husbands. Nor is there any evidence that women choosing medical delivery were opting for small families. After her adventure with laudanum, Hannah Sewall gave birth to ten more children. Hannah Bridges had an additional seven, including another set of twins, after that first pair of stillborn infants. In Martha's own family, fertility was unchanged from generation to generation. Her mother had had ten children, she nine, her sister Dorothy Barton thirteen. Her own daughters and daughters-in-law were equally prolific. Lucy and Dolly had eleven children each, Sally twelve, and although Hannah's completed family size is unknown, she had given birth to eight children before the diary closed.

Since a family labor force was the basis of the New England economy, parents were understandably concerned about producing the proper balance of boys and girls. In about a quarter of her delivery entries, Martha noted the birth order of the child, and often the sex ratio as well. "Her 8th Child; the number of sex are Equal," she wrote, or "7th Child of which 4 are daughters."62 (These descriptions give no indication of a gender bias; Hallowell women gave birth to "fine daughters" as well as "fine sons," though the adjective "lusty" may have been reserved for boys.) Martha was pleased when Mrs. James Hinkley "was safe dilivrd at sun set of a daughter," explaining that the woman had seven sons and until then only one daughter, then "in her 15th 5th year." Martha's neighbor Lydia Densmore had the opposite problem. In 1797, she gave birth to her twelfth child and ninth daughter. Fortunately, the family business -tailoring and dressmaking- was well adapted to girls.63

What was expected, then, was a heroic commitment to childbearing, an outlook reflected in Martha Ballard's own willingness to spend herself in delivering others. She was compassionate, gentle, concerned for her neighbors' welfare, but though she assumed that a certain amount of suffering was the

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 195 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

common lot of womanhood, she was impatient with whining. Mrs. Baxter, for example, really seemed to enjoy illness. "Find her better but insensible of the favour," Martha reported after one visit, and a few days later added, "went to see Mrs Baxter who I think is better tho shee is not of that mind." When the woman suffered "a turn of hysterics," Martha sat with her through the night and into the next afternoon, though a week later she was dismayed to hear that "Mrs Baxter is no Better or shee is insensable shee is."64

More distressing was the behavior of her old friend and neighbor Elizabeth Weston, who was overwhelmed by her last pregnancy, an unexpected and probably unwelcome event. She was forty-five years old, her youngest child already six. Furthermore, since her daughter Betsy had recently married Thomas Fillebrown, she was more disposed to welcome grandchildren than another child of her own.65 Her anxiety grew more intense during the last weeks of pregnancy. Though her previous delivery had been uneventful, she grew fearful that this one would not go well. There were as yet no physical signs of labor, but she wanted her midwife with her.

Martha spent almost two weeks in and out of the Weston house, leaving when necessary to deliver other women. "Mrs Wesson remains much as shee has been," Martha wrote on October 28, after four days of sleeping and waiting with no sign of labor. "[She] Consented that I should go home & see how my famely were." If there had been a half-frozen river between them, the long vigil might have been justified, but the Westons and the Ballards were still relatively near neighbors despite the Ballards' removal from the mills.

Still, Martha returned the next day, listening, watching, and apparently growing increasingly annoyed. "Mr Wesson brot me some work, she wrote on November 4. By November 6 she had had enough. "I Came home," she wrote. "Mrs Wesson as well as she has been." The woman presumably got the point. When she called again she meant it. The summons came on November 9 at 3:00 a.m., and "Shee was safe delivered at 4 hour 30 minutes of a fine son." A safe delivery did not relieve

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 196 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

the problem. A week later Martha wrote, "I began to make candles & was calld to see Mrs Weston. I find her as well as Could be Expected but of the mind Shee Cannot take care of hir infant at home. A stupid afair I think, but Shee must do as shee pleases."66

A harsh judgment from an old friend. When Martha returned a month later, Mrs. Weston was as determined on illness as ever. "She is weak," Martha reported, adding by way of explanation, "Shee has not walked her room any since shee was put to bed. Her infant is at Mr Hewins."67 Perhaps one of the town's physicians took over the management of her case. Martha had nothing more to say about it. She delivered Elizabeth Weston's daughter Betsy Fillebrown of her first child on February 2, making no reference to the presence or absence of the grandmother. (Mrs. Weston was, however, clearly present when her daughter gave birth to a second child two years later.) Perhaps there was a brief estrangement between the two women, though if so the old patterns of neighborliness had clearly been restored by the end of the summer.68

In sending out her infant to be nursed, Elizabeth Weston violated a particularly strong taboo. Only a severe and intractable illness could justify separating a mother and child. When Lucy Towne fell ill of a fever a week after delivery, she struggled to continue nursing her child. Not until ten days later, when the baby itself seemed to be suffering, was a neighbor summoned to give "the poor Babe suck," Martha explaining that "its mammy has not but very little for it." Even then, steps were taken to preserve lactation against the time when Lucy would once again feed her child. "Lucy is a little mending," her mother wrote. "Parthena drew her Breasts got a small matter of milk." During this period two different neighbors nursed the baby.69

A considerable part of Martha's medical practice involved treating infants for "sore mouths" and their mothers for "painful breasts." Women could develop abscesses at any time during lactation. Martha had various remedies. In one case, after a poultice of sorrel proved ineffective, she "opened" (lanced) the breast. When one of her own daughters developed an abscess

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 197 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

she was concerned enough to call Dr. Howard, who "recommended a wheat bread poltis." When that failed, she tried applying yellow lily roots, but that only seemed to increase the pain. Meanwhile the infant grew "restless for want of the Breast ... we could not git any milk from my daughter's breast." This time, she was reluctant for some reason to lance the sore herself. When Dr. Howard did not think "it fit to open," she sent for Dr. Colman, who performed the operation: "It had a Copeous discharg," she reported, adding with satisfaction, "Shee seems more comfortable; the infant is cleverly."70

For Martha the final stage of any delivery was collecting her fee. In the margin of her diary entry for December 17, 1793, she wrote, "Receivd 12/ March 5th 1794 of Mr Hamlin." That Theophilus Hamlin paid twelve shillings for his daughter's delivery was unusual; that it took him three months to do so was not. Martha's standard charge in the 1790s was six shillings, paid in cash, in kind, or in credit at one of the local stores.71 Perhaps more payments were in kind than the cash values recorded in the diary would indicate. On November 28, for example, in the diary excerpt that opens this chapter, she wrote, "Mr Lathrop paid me my fee for attending his wife the 19th of March last." In the margin of the March 19 entry, she wrote, "receivd sugar Nov 28."

Midwifery payments reflected the economy of the town. In the course of her career Martha received everything from "1m shingles" to "a pair flat irons." Most payments were in food, textiles, or household necessities: cheese, butter, wheat, rye, corn, baby pigs and turkeys, candles, a great wheel, unwashed wool, checked cloth, 1/2 quintal of cod, teapots, thimbles, a looking glass, handkerchiefs, and snuff. Martha rarely commented on a payment unless it was unusually generous or notably meager. "Received 2 lb coffee, 1 yd ribbon, & a cap border as Extraordinary for waiting on her," she wrote after one delivery. In contrast, Savage Bolton gave her "1 1/2 Bushl of apples in the fall not very good."72

She occasionally "forgave" a family the fee. When she delivered Charles Clark's fourth child, she noted "her 3d is destitute

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 198 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

of reason by reason of fitts." She had come to that delivery expecting to collect the unpaid fee for the third baby as well as the new charge for the fourth, but seeing the family's sorrow she wrote off the earlier debt. "I gave this fee Sept 5th on acount off the infirmity off their Child," she wrote in the margin of the first entry.73 Martha was also capable of seeing to the physical as well as the medical needs of her patients. As we have seen, a day after delivering Mrs. Welch of a stillborn child, she sent Mr. Ballard "to see that she had wood, made her a shovel etc." But after a later delivery to the same woman, who was now conspicuously without a husband, she felt less charitable. "Called by Mr Garish to see Mrs Welch who was ... delivered . . of a daughter which shee declared said Gerish was the father of," she wrote. Whether the woman was successful in getting child support from Gerish we do not know. She paid for this delivery herself "by weaving 14 & 1/2 yds all wool Cloath."74

Fees exceeding six shillings usually meant additional expenses. "I receivd 9/ as fee & hors hire & medisin," she wrote after an arduous journey on muddy roads to the Buzel delivery. Probably most husbands avoided the cost of "horse hire" by fetching the midwife themselves or by relying on a neighbor. That fewer than a fifth of Martha Ballard's patients in 1793 paid more than six shillings suggests that she used medicine sparingly. The length of labor did not affect the fee. She spent a day and a half with Mrs. Hinkley and only five hours with Mrs. Coutch, though she received exactly the same fee, six shillings, from each.

Payments larger than nine shillings were very rare during any part of her career. In fact, the conclusion is inescapable that it was the generosity or affluence of the father rather than extra services by the midwife that accounted for very large fees. Certain men among the Kennebec gentry-William and John Brooks, Theophilus Hamlin, Chandler Robbins, Samuel Colman--almost always paid twelve shillings or more. Henry Sewall stayed closer to the six-shilling standard, though in October of 1799, when Tabitha delivered her eighth child, a daughter, he gave Martha Ballard twelve shillings. Perhaps he was especially

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 199 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

grateful for the outcome of the delivery. Though he didn't mention it in his diary, Martha Ballard noted that "Mrs Sewall ... was viry ill a little while but is cleverly now."75

Peter Parker's payment didn't make it into the margin of his daughter's birth entry in 1793, but he eventually paid, and paid generously. "Mr Parker gave me 18/ for attending his Lady in her illness with her Last Child," Martha wrote on January 27, 1794. A few days later, after another trip to the Parker house, she added, "his Lady made me a present of 1 1/2 yards ribbin." After crossing the river eight times and spending nine full days at the Parker house, off and on, she deserved the extra payment. Not all her patients had the wherewithal or the inclination to act accordingly. She received only six shillings from Mrs. Norcross after that famous April delivery (described in the Introduction), even though she had made four trips downriver and had spent nine days waiting for a "lingering labor." The Norcross case was by no means an isolated one. One year Martha spent two days each with Mrs. Hersey, Mrs. Pierce, Mrs. Cocks, and Mrs. Plaisted, four days with Mrs. Savage, and made three trips to the Sewalls', spending a total of seven days with Tabitha. Two husbands paid six shillings, one seven, one nine, and another apparently nothing at all. Henry Sewall gave Martha eight shillings and three pence.76 The length of labor was clearly one of the acts of God over which neither the midwife nor her patients had any control.

Martha's standard fee -six shillings- is comparable to what Ephraim could claim for a day spent "writing plans" or appraising an estate. Of course, the time involved in a delivery was more variable (and the hours less appealing). Still, midwifery paid better than most female occupations. For example, a weaver working full-time at her loom could earn at most four shillings a day. Because most men seem to have taken pride in paying for their wives' deliveries, midwifery also gave Martha greater access to cash or store credits than women whose trade was entirely within the female economy.77 Perhaps most of the cash values listed in the diary really were a form of credit. When Martha stopped in at Captain Molloy's store on December 9,

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 200 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

1793, to buy a shawl, she was probably collecting part of the twenty-four-shilling fee he had given her three weeks before. It is not surprising that the really big fees in the diary, those double, triple, and even quadruple fees offered in about 15 percent of cases, were offered by storekeepers and merchants. They could afford that kind of extravagance since, with the markup, twenty-four shillings at the store cost them considerably less. John Sheppard was the most consistently generous of the merchants, probably because as agent for the Vaughans he could afford it.

  The "Elligant supper" served after Mrs. Molloy's delivery reinforces the notion that John Molloy was showing off a bit in multiplying the midwife's fee. Prosperity did not ensure domestic tranquillity, however. Martha Molloy gave birth to a second child two years later and then disappeared from Martha's midwifery records, presumably because she and her husband had moved to Portland or some other coastal town, though his shipping business occasionally brought him back to Hallowell. (On June 13, 1796, Martha noted: "Capt. Molloy sleeps here this night.") In 1801 Martha Molloy sued for divorce in the Supreme Judicial Court, charging her husband with desertion and adultery. Supporting testimony came from Mary Wyman of Salem, Massachusetts, who admitted that John Molloy was the father of her illegitimate child. Her deposition did not spare details:

She affirmed that John Molloy, mariner, Did at Salem ... Lodge in the same Bed with me the deponent thro' the Nights of the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth days of January, in the Year of our Lord One thousand and Eight hundred, in my Chamber, in the House of Mr. Ashley in said Salem, and both of us being undressed without any Cloths on except our Linen, and that He the said John Molloy had carnal knowledge of my Body, during those Nights aforesaid ... and then and there did Beget me with a Female Child, which was born on the thirteenth day of October last past, and I further declare that he solemnly declared that he was a Widower, at the

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 201 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

same time, but afterwards I heard that he had a Wife and two Children at Portland and that his wifes father had taken his Daughter Home to his own House.78

Martha Molloy was one of two Hallowell women to get divorces that year. Nabby Sylvester (another of Martha's patients) also charged her husband with infidelity, claiming he had "committed divers act of Adultery" in Boston and in the West Indies.79 Martha never mentioned these divorces or any others in the diary. Still, her quiet entries suggest the realities of maritime marriage. After a delivery at Nathan Burges's house, she wrote drily, "Her husband is at Sea if living."80


Novelists and filmmakers have long exploited the drama of birth, the agony of labor, the shadowy threat to the mother's life, the anxious pacing of the father. Martha Ballard's diary shifts the focus of adventure from the labor itself to the midwife's journey. If spring breakup brought high adventure, winter offered a numbing course in endurance. One day, called at daybreak during a heavy snow, she trudged across the river and "as far as the plain beyond Esquire Howards Bridge," when she "mett a mesage Enforming the woman was got safe to Bed." (No delivery, and hence no fee.) "I had two falls, one on my way there, the other on my Return. The Storm continues yet. The snow is Levil with the top of the lower pain of glass of our north window. I travild some Rods in the snow where it was almost as high as my waist."81

Some weeks she barely thawed from one journey before she began another. Setting out in a "doleful storm," she went by horseback as far as Pollard's tavern, then took a sleigh upriver to the Boltons', Mrs. Savage with her. "We were once over sett," she wrote, carefully accounting each mishap. "Once I got out & helpt push behind the carriage. We arivd safe at sun sett." The baby was born at eight; at six the next morning ("clear but very high wind") Martha was on her way through the brilliant cold to a house five miles downriver. "Men shoveled through

 

top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 202 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

drifts & we arivd at 9," she wrote. She was called back upriver the following day, this baby arriving "in the middle of the night," stopped home the next morning ("clear, calm, and cold,") to take a nap before leaving again ("clear and excessive cold") to officiate at yet another delivery.82

The Kennebec country offered adventures for every season. Even in good weather there was a certain thrill in crossing a modest stream "on the string piece of the bridge." Given the rough country beyond the river, riding was also unpredictable. "My hors mird in a swamp and I fell off," Martha reported after one delivery. The mire "by the Bridg between here and Densmores" was also a pitfall, though ordinary ruts and ridges could be just as troublesome. "The hors Blunderd & I fell & hurt me," Martha would write, usually without further comment or explanation. The family horse was a stumbler, but he was at least familiar. Mounting Captain Springer's horse after another delivery, she found herself thrown to the ground as the beast ran under a shed. "Broak my specktakles and allmost my limbs," she reported drily.83 Since she generally rode sidesaddle, failing off a horse was easier, but perhaps less dangerous, than it would have been if she had ridden astride. At least she was well padded with petticoats and skirts. She certainly preferred sidesaddle. "I wrote a mans saddle which fatagud me very much," she complained after one journey home.84

A cloudy night could transform any journey into a pilgrim's progress, as on the April night when she and Woodward Allin "carried a candle to the top of Burnt Hill." Lacking light, she resorted to wilderness savvy. "Calld in hast to go to Mr. Whites," she wrote. "The Boys Landed me at Jackson Landing. I took off[f] my shoes & walkt in my stockins. Steerd as strait a Coars as I Could and reacht Mr Whites very soon but was much fatagued."85

Martha was proud enough of her adventures to write about them, though she was also pleased to note when more commodious transportation was available. "Was conducted home in a carriage by Mr Pitt," she wrote after delivering Jonathan and Sally's second baby. But there was little danger of her growing

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

Page 203 Chapter Five - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

soft. In 1798, after another delivery in the Hussey neighborhood, she crossed the river to the Sheppards', walked from there to the Parmers', and then rode "a Colt home on which woman never was before."86 She was sixty-two years old.

What took Martha Ballard out of bed in the cold of night? Why was she willing to risk frozen feet and broken bones to practice her trade? Certainly midwifery paid well, at least by the standards usually assigned women's work. Martha cared about her "rewards," and she kept her midwifery accounts carefully. Yet money alone cannot account for her commitment. Nor is it enough to say that serving others was her way of serving God. She interpreted her work, as all of life, in religious terms: God rescued her from the spring flood, sustained her through difficult deliveries, preserved the lives of mothers and children, and gave her the strength to continue her work. (Even such a prosaic end-of-the-year summary as "I have Lost 42 nights sleep the year past" was a kind of spiritual accounting.) Yet religious faith is also an inadequate explanation. Midwifery was a form of service and a source of material rewards, but even more than that it was an inner calling, an assertion of being. Martha Ballard's specialty brought together the gentle and giving side of her nature with her capacity for risk and her need for autonomy.

The fathers who fetched her in the black of night leaned on her skill, offering her the command of their horses and bedchambers, bestowing lumber credits and teapots for her service. The women who circled around her at the height of travail respected her caring and sustained her strength. The women who reached for her in the anguish of travail extended her motherhood in their own. Martha Ballard needed her patients as much as they needed her.

 
top | bottom

162|163|164|165|166|167|168|169|170|171|172|173|174|175
176|177|178|179|180|181|182|183|184|185|186|187|188|189
190|191|192|193|194|195|196|197|198|199|200|201|202|203

 

Notes

Page 392 Chapter Five Notes - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Notes for Pages 162-170

 

Chapter Five

  1. "Bulah" was probably the Beulah Ephraims who married Laban Prince in June of 1793, shortly after her child was born. In the town records Henry Sewall described Bulah and her husband as "molattos, both of Hallowell." "Black Hitty" may have been the Hitty Slocum who appeared with Nicholas Wilson ("both Negroes") in the marriage lists six months after Martha delivered her of a second son. HTR, I. These entries for non-whites were written crosswise at the bottom of a page giving town meeting minutes for September 2, 1782. Martha identified the father of that child as "a Portugues who was Brot here by Mrs. Hussey from Nantucket" MMB, August 2, 1793, February, 2 1795. return
  2. Part of the 1792 valuation list for Hallowell is in North, pp. 240-242. return
  3. MMB, 1793, March 31-April 1, August 13, 1791 return
  4. The population increased from 1,199 in the federal census of 1790 to 2,575 in the now two towns of Hallowell and Augusta in 1800. return
  5. MMB, January 7-14, 1795, February 11, 1795. return
  6. MMB, April 24, 1794, July 29, 1808, March 31, 1800 return
  7. Charles White, ATreatise on the Management of Pregnant and Lying-in Women (London, 1772; rpt. Worcester, Mass., 1793), p. 76. For two very different assessments of the literature of "natural" childbirth in the eigheentht century, see Adrian Wilson, "William Hunter and the varieties of man-midwifery," and Edward Shorter, "The management of normal deliveries and the generation of William Hunter," in William Hunter and the eighteenth-century medical world, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 1985). return
  8. An Edgecomb, Maine, jury called to investigate the death of an infant reported that the mother had been "left alone in her House, and [was] inturly destitute of any help in the Time of her traveling pains by which means it supposed that the said Child came into the world a Corpse, and the mother (when found) was but just alive": LCSJC, Files, 923:109.

 

top | bottom

Notes: 392|393|394|395|396|397

Page 393 Chapter Five Notes - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Notes for Pages 170-179

    return
  1. MMB, e.g., March 17, 1789, December 30, 1789, January 2, 1790, December 30, 1790, February 12, 1791. return
  2. Estes and Goodman, The Changing Humors of Portsmouth, p. 298. For more detail on this point, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "The Living Mother of a Living Child: Midwifery and Mortality in Eighteenth-Century New England," WMQ 46 (1989): 27-48. return
  3. B. M. Willmott Dobbie, "An Attempt to Estimate the True Rate of Maternal Mortality, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," Medical History 26 (1982): 79-90; White, Treatise, pp. 236-240. return
  4. "A Copy of Records from an Original Memorandum kept by Mrs. Lydia (Peters) Baldwin . . ., " typescript, Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library; Worth Estes, Hall Jackson and the Purple Foxglove, p. 120. return
  5. Edmund Chapman, ATreatise on the Improvement of Midwifery (London, 1759, 1st ed., 1733), p. xx. return
  6. MMB, October 23, 1796, March 21, 1795. return
  7. Sarah Stone, A Complete Practice of Midwifery. . . (London, 1737), p. 67; Chapman, Midwifery, p. 132; Henry Bracken, The Midwife's Companion; or, a Treatise of Midwifery (London, 1737), pp. 124-125. William Hunter attacked the method of manual extraction urged in Chapman and in Bracken. I used Dr. William Appleton's handwritten copy of Hunter's "Lectures on the gravid uterus," Appleton Papers, Waterville [Maine] Historical Society, pp. 57-58. See also White, Treatise, pp. 47, 87-88. return
  8. Hunter, "Lectures," Appleton in pp. 59-60. return
  9. Bracken, Midwife's Companion, pp. 175-178; Chapman, Midwifery, p. 159. return
  10. MMB, May 3, 1792. return
  11. Adrian Wilson concludes that man-midwifery in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England "tended to be concentrated upon difficult births. Normal births were brought into male practice only via advance and onset calls, and even these calls were usually made because difficulty was expected." Class distinctions were important, advance and onset calls being most common among the nobility. "Man-midwifery," pp. 357, 362. return
  12. MMB, November 17, 1793 return
  13. MMB, July 8, 1796, August 14, 1796, June 14, 1798, July 15, 1798; HS, October 4, 1799. return
  14. Bracken, Midwife's Companion, p. 194. return
  15. North, p. 93, 814; HS, August 28, 1798. The Benjamin Vaughan Papers, MeHS, include an account with William Mathew, "debtor to Dr. Benjamin Page for $115.76 in medical fees, including three charges for "delivery & attendance" at $6 and one at $4. There may have been unusual circumstances these births, but it seems likely that doctors' fees were from twice to three as high times as high as midwives'. return
  16. Fifty-three percent of the heads of household in the combined Hallowell-Augusta federal censuses for 1800 appear on her birth lists; 47 percent of

 

top | bottom

Notes: 392|393|394|395|396|397

Page 394 Chapter Five Notes - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Notes for Pages 180-185

the men listed as selectman, town representatives, or county officers between 1790 and 1796 do so. This does not mean that she delivered all of the babies born to these families, only that she delivered some.

    return
  1. George Thornton Edwards, Music and Musicians of Maine (Portland: The Southworth Press, 1928), pp. 22-23. On February 23, 1790, Margaret Belcher was delivered, in her husband's absence, of "a fine son shee calls Hyrum," giving him the distinction of being the only newborn infant in the diary with a name. Coincidentally, Sarah Sheppard was also a musician, a teacher of voice and piano. return
  2. MMB, October 21, 1794. return
  3. Chapman, Midwifery, pp. xvi-xviii; Stone, Complete Practice, p. 36. return
  4. Dr. Kittredge's forceps and his copy of William Smellie, A Treatise on the Improvement of Midwifery, 3d ed. (London, 1759), are at the North Andover Historical Society. return
  5. MMB, November 11, 1785. return
  6. MMB, May 19, 1792. Dr. Hubbard, a native of New Hampshire, is described by one Augusta historian as a "physician and farmer" in East Readfield. His son, Dr. John Hubbard of Hallowell, was governor of Maine, 1850-1853. Nash, Augusta, p. 403. return
  7. MMB, August 29, 1797, February 28, 1799, July 19, 1794. return
  8. MMB, March 29, 1789, June 20, 1798. See also April 15, 1797, October 20, 1810. In describing the latter case, she noted that the woman had "3 Doctors with her." Worth Estes, Hall Jackson and the Purple Foxglove, p. 120, believes that Hall Jackson may have been called to a disproportionate number of twin births (eight sets in 511 pregnancies). Lydia Baldwin delivered ten pairs of twins in 926 deliveries. Since Martha Ballard delivered fewer twins, proportionately, than Baldwin or Jackson, a few Hallowell women, knowing they were expecting twins, may have called a doctor at the outset, though, given Martha's success, that seems unlikely. return
  9. MMB, October 12, 1788. return
  10. MMB, November 26, 1796. return
  11. MMB, December 23-27, 1791. return
  12. MMB, December 24, 1796, March 11, 1790, April 3, 1795, May 27,1795, July 31, 1795. return
  13. MMB, April 7, 11, 1796. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (London, 1651), is full of herbal recipes for use during labor, as we might suppose. Charles White assumed that midwives administered hot drinks and alcohol during labor and after delivery. return
  14. MMB, April 25, 1798, June 4, 1794, November 13, 1790. return
  15. Bracken, Midwife's Companion, pp. 117-118. return
  16. MMB, March 12, 1789: "I returned at 12 [midnight] precisely by our time piece. Left my patients cleverly." Sarah Stone disapproved of delivering a woman "standing on her feet," a method "too commonly practis'd in the country": Complete Practice, p. 55.

 

top | bottom

Notes: 392|393|394|395|396|397

Page 395 Chapter Five Notes - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Notes for Pages 185-193

    return
  1. MMB, April 1, 1798. return
  2. MMB, March 5, 1801, October 8, 1790. return
  3. MMB, June 17, 1792. At Tabitha Sewall's third delivery (November 23, 1790), Mrs. Brooks, Belcher, Colman, Pollard, and Voce assisted. return
  4. MMB, May 4-7, 1793. return
  5. MMB, March 22, 1797, March 9, 1796, March 16, 1810. Thomas Densmore was the baby's grandfather; the birth probably took place at his house. return
  6. MMB, February 2, 1812, March 18, 1801, February 27, 1797. return
  7. MMB, June 21, 1798, January 2-February 4, 1801 . Understandably, the town history is silent concerning Davis's alliance with Hitty Pierce, who later married someone else. For more on Pierce and Davis, see Chapter Seven. return
  8. HS, April, 10, 26, 1974, May 10, 1794, January 28, 31, 1795. return
  9. Charlotte may have been a sister of Hannah Cool, who was Martha's helper in 1787 (see Chapter One). The diary refers to at least four women with the surname Cool: Peggy, Polly, Hannah, and Katherine (the Mrs. Williams of Chapters One and Two). Miscellaneous entries in Moses Appleton's papers refer to Hannah and to Jane Coole, who apparently had a child; Moses Appleton Day Book, 1796, Waterville Historical Society, pp. 4, 8, 9, 10, 38, 45, 144, 146. return
  10. MMB, November 26, 1790, October 20, 1795, June 15, 1796, April 14, 1800, December 31, 1795, March 6, 1798. return
  11. MMB, November 27, 1795. return
  12. MMB, January 27-28, 1794, February 1, 1794 return
  13. MMB, May 31, 1799, November 28, 1787, August 24, 30, 1797. return
  14. John Rynier to Henry Knox, February 19, 1798, quoted in Alan Taylor, "Liberty-Men and White Indians: Frontier Migration, Popular Protest, and the Pursuit of Property in the Wake of the American Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1985), p. 209; MMB, March 11, 1795; Bracken, Midwife's Companion, p. 176; White, Treatise, p. 93. return
  15. MMB, April 17, 1800, February 15, 1790, July 23-24, 1796. return
  16. MMB, October 21, 1787; HS, October 23, 1799, November 3, 1799. return
  17. MMB, e.g., March 26, 1789, October 20, 1789, June 8, 1793, May 22, 1788. return
  18. Leavitt, Brought to Bed, p.165, discusses a case in which the husband did have sexual intercourse with his wife on the third and fourth days after delivery. return
  19. MMB, October 18-19, 1802, February 26, 27, 1789, March 1, 2, 4, 1789; Siegel and Van Blarcom, Obstetrical Nursing, pp. 208-213, 522- 526; Wertz and Wertz, Lying-In, pp. 119- 128; Leavitt, Brought to Bed: pp. 154-155. See also Dorothy L. Lansing, W. Robert Penman, and Dorland J. Davis, "Puerperal Fever and the Group B Beta Hemolytic Streptococcus," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57 (Spring 1983): 70-80; and a comment by Leavitt, Brought to Bed, p. 166. return
  20. MMB, March 31, 1790, April 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 1790. return

 

top | bottom

Notes: 392|393|394|395|396|397

Page 396 Chapter Five Notes - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Notes for Pages 193-201

  1. MMB, November 26, 1790. If this is Mrs. Hodge's fifth delivery, someone else must have attended the third. There are only three previous deliveries in the diary, September 1785, September 1786, and October 1789 (and two others in November 1792 and June 1794). return
  2. MMB, February 18, 1791, September 1, 1791. return
  3. MMB, May 18, 1790. return
  4. MMB, October 1, & 5, 1794, November 14, 19, 22, 23, 24, 30, 1794, December 3, 4, 1794. return
  5. North, p. 954; HTR, Marriage Intentions, January 31, 1791. return
  6. MMB, November 16, 1791. return
  7. MMB, December 12, 1791. return
  8. The illness apparently had no long-term effect on either mother or child. Mrs. Weston died in 1831 at the age of eighty-five, her youngest son in 1870 at the age of eighty-nine. return
  9. MMB, May 1 -June 2, 1789. return
  10. MMB, August 1, 4, 1788, February 11, 14, 15, 17, 23, 26, 1801. return
  11. In 1793, only four birth entries fail to record some sort of fee. One of those was for "Daughter Town," who delivered her ninth child on October 3. The others may have been the result of oversight. In twenty-seven of the fifty-three entries she specified six shillings; ten other entries indicate a fee exceeding six shillings, some specifying additional amounts for "medicine and horse hire." Eight others simply say XX, presumably meaning "fee paid." Two mention commodities without giving cash values. The 1793 entries are typical of the diary as a whole, though fees rose slightly toward 1800. Of 385 midwifery entries specifying cash values, 374 are for less than ten shillings. Most are between six and nine shillings. Only seventy-five entries list commodities alone. return
  12. MMB, December 15, 1791, March 17, 1795. return
  13. MMB, September 5, 1792, December 3, 1789. return
  14. MMB, February 3, 5, 6, 8, 1791, March 20, 1796, May 3, 1797. return
  15. MMB, December 30, 1789, December 17, 1793, November 15, 1795, May 5, 1799, October 21, 1794, August 22, 1796, March 15, 1797, October 22-23, 1799, HS, October 4, 22, 23, 1799. return
  16. MMB, January 24, 1794, April 2, 1794, December 19, 1794, July 13, 1794, February 20, 1794, April 5, 1794. return
  17. That payment by fathers was the norm is suggested by the entry for June 1793, "I received 6/ of Mrs. Brown. Her husband is gone down the river." return
  18. KCSJC Files, Box 68. return
  19. I searched the Minute Books and File Papers for Lincoln County, 1785-1797, then at the Office of the Clerk, Supreme Judicial Court, Suffolk County Courthouse, Boston. I found twelve divorce "libels" in Lincoln County between 1785 and 1797, six in which the wife charged adultery, two in which the husband did so, four in which the wife charged cruelty, and two in which the husband charged desertion. The maritime theme is dominant

 

top | bottom

Notes: 392|393|394|395|396|397

Page 397 Chapter Five Notes - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Notes for Pages 201-217

from the beginning, as is the charge of intemperance. North, p. 834, says that John Molloy "died," after which his wife married Samuel Prescott of New Sharon. Edward McCarron, who is doing research on Irish migration into Maine in this period, believes that Molloy may have been Irish, though the number of John Molloys who appear in country records makes sure identification difficult. McCarron has found that John Molloy of Hallowell was admitted as a retailer in 1790, was in jail for debt in 1796, lost land to satisfy a debt in 1797 (Ephraim Ballard as surveyor), and was presented by a grand jury, though acquitted, for some unspecified crime in 1797. return

  1. MMB, April 24, 1794. return
  2. MMB, March 31, 1785. return
  3. MMB, January 19-25, 1792. return
  4. MMB, April 27, 1791, April 18, 1795, September 17, 1789, July 10, 1797. See also April 21, 1786, March 6, 1792. return
  5. MMB, July 13, 1791. On the side saddle, see July 22, 1786, and February 25, 1791. return
  6. MMB, April 12, 1785, June 20, 1799 return
  7. MMB, October 26, 1797. return

 

top | bottom

Notes: 392|393|394|395|396|397






home your interests who was Martha? Martha's diary book film doing history archive on your own