BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

This ideal of aseptic births to decrease maternal and fetal illness and death led to the
specialized branch of obstetrics. Even as early as the 1870s, physicians began to establish
specialized medical professional organizations, such as the American Gynecological Society
(1876) and the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (1888). No longer was
the general practitioner qualified to attend births. Obstetrics was the second specialized medical
board examination established by the American Medical Association, in 1930. 68 As Judith
Walzer Leavitt discusses, by 1940 over half of all births in the United States took place in
hospitals, with physicians displacing midwives as the primary birth attendants. 69 In contrast,
even in 1940s China, the vast majority of births still took place at home, though modern nurses,
midwives, and obstetricians had aseptic births nationwide, though not necessarily in a hospital
setting, as their primary goal.
Finally, the development of modern hospitals also contributed to the increased need for
trained medical personnel in the United States and abroad. In early nineteenth-century America,
hospitals were charity institutions for the poor who could not afford physicians or nurses to treat
them in their own homes. Advances in scientific medicine led more and more people to
patronize hospitals. Their number in the United States grew from 170 in 1880 to over 1,500 by
1904. Independent hospitals owned by physicians, religious groups, or rich philanthropists
gradually replaced poor almshouse institutions. 70
Medical missionaries expanded the new ideas of public health, medical specialization,
and hospitals to the mission fields and combined them with a quest for salvation. The
missionaries’ belief in scientific medicine was similar to their belief in salvation with Jesus
68 The first was Opthamology, begun in 1917. Edward Stewart Taylor, History of the American Gynecological
Society 1876-1981 and American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 1888-1981 (St. Louis: C.V.
Mosby Company, 1985).
69 Leavitt and Numbers, eds., Sickness & Health in America.
70 More, Restoring the Balance, 105-07.
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