Conception and Pregnancy
Conception and Pregnancy
This chapter surveys the ideas and practices surrounding conception and pregnancy that circulated in colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico. It demonstrates that knowledge of these subjects remained relatively stable across time and that midwives persisted as the most frequent providers of health care to women during pregnancy despite the emergence of a small cadre of professional obstetricians at the end of the colonial period. Early ethnohistorical records, inquisition files, and criminal cases record the extent of the persistence of pre-Columbian medical knowledge about pregnancy and conception through the colonial period, including the persistence of pregnant women’s use of Nahua temazcal baths. One changing development over time was the rise in the nineteenth century of claims to medical certainty about the determination of whether conception had occurred. This chapter also provides a qualitative and quantitative portrait of the racial, economic, and civil status of Mexican midwives and assesses public perceptions of these women whom Mexicans of various strata tended to hold in high regard, even in the context of the ever-increasing state initiatives to professionalize midwifery.
Keywords: conception, midwives, obstetricians, professionalization, pregnancy, temazcal
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