Genealogic Origins of Nurse‐Midwifery Education Programs in the United States

Abstract

This article presents a genealogy of all known basic and refresher nurse-midwifery education programs enabling every CNM and CM to track their individual lineage back to Hattie Hemschemeyer or Mary Breckinridge. Feeling connected to our founding foremothers increases our understanding of who we are and what our commitment is to the families we serve. Genealogy also gives us an opportunity to reflect on the early history and continuing historical trends of our education programs.

Genealogia do cuidado na perspectiva foucaultiana Genealogy of care in foucault’s perspective

“…This speech organization has been at the clinic in the last years of the eighteenth century, the hospital space. 15,16 With the insertion of the clinic in the hospital, this turns into pedagogy and its development will give a new provision to the objects of knowledge -the look of the doctor not only detects, but discovers, names and classifies the disease. 5 In this context, the hospital, considered until then as "workhouse" or place for "the salvation of souls", becomes the great school, funded by the rich, serves poor and transform their suffering into knowledge that is useful to the rich.…”

The History of Nurse‐Midwifery/Midwifery Education

“…Catholic University affiliated with Catholic Maternity Institute (CMI) in 1947. This remained the only university affiliation until the mid‐1950s when Columbia University (1955), Johns Hopkins University (1956), and Yale University (1956) started nurse‐midwifery education programs, and the Maternity Center Association (MCA) nurse‐midwifery program affiliated with the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn in 1958 2,3 . Three of these programs (CMI, Johns Hopkins, and MCA) were certificate programs and 3 were master's degree programs (Catholic University, Columbia, and Yale 10,24 (Figure 3).…”

“…Three of these programs (CMI, Johns Hopkins, and MCA) were certificate programs and 3 were master's degree programs (Catholic University, Columbia, and Yale 10,24 (Figure 3). The other 4 programs in existence between 1930 and the 1950s were all certificate programs: The Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery started in 1939 (Figure 4), the Tuskegee School of Nurse‐Midwifery in existence from 1941 to 1946, the Flint‐Goodrich School of Nurse‐Midwifery from 1942 to 1943, and the School of Nurse‐Midwifery of the Puerto Rico Department of Health at Hato Rey in existence from 1954 to 1960 2,3,10,23,25,26 . This meant that while nurse‐midwifery educators were talking about situating nurse‐midwifery education within or affiliated with university settings, the reality was that more than half of the existing programs were neither.…”

“…Nurse‐midwifery education has existed in the United States since 1925 1–3 . Originally, nurse‐midwifery was an answer to what was called the “midwife problem” in the early 1900s.…”

The American College of Nurse‐Midwives' Dream Becomes Reality: The Division of Accreditation

“…With the advent of nurse‐midwifery programs in the United States during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, 2,4 efforts were begun to compile data on nurse‐midwifery education programs and their graduates. The first efforts were organized through the Nurse‐Midwifery Section of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing.…”