The cataloguing of the records of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) is now completed and the catalogue is available online at the Wellcome Library, reference SA/ICM.
The ICM is at the forefront of international policy development to influence and promote midwifery at global and national levels, and to pro-actively support international strategies to improve maternal and child health, for the achievement of ‘Safe Motherhood’ for all women.
The Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease is delighted to announce a forthcoming exhibition:
An exhibition of the history of the public images of embryos and foetuses will take place in the Holliday Building at Durham University’s Queen’s Campus in Stockton-on-Tees from Friday 7th October until Friday 9th December.
The Foetus Goes Public looks at how images of embryos and foetuses shape our understanding of life and reproduction. This exhibition tells the fascinating story of how the foetus moved from obscure medieval manuscripts to become a public icon in the twentieth century that, today, is available to everyone at any time through the internet.
Dr Lutz Sauerteig from the Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease will officially open the exhibition on 7th October at 1.30 pm.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of public lectures :
Prof John McLachlan (School of Medicine and Health), ‘Imagining the Embryo’ (21 October, 12.45pm, Holliday Building, Room A011).
Dr Nadja Reissland (Department of Psychology), ‘Fetal Crying: Is the Fetal Cry Face Gestalt Associated with Prenatal Depression and Attachment?’ (11 November, 10.00 am, Wolfson Research Institute, Room F009).
Dr Sebastian Pranghofer (CHMD and Department of Philosophy), ‘Personhood Before Birth? Early Modern Images of the Unborn’ (25 November, 12.45pm, Holliday Building, Room A015/016).
Entry to the exhibition and the lectures is free.
For more information, contact Rachel Simpson on telephone 0191 3340700, email: rachel.simpson@durham.ac.uk or visit http://www.dur.ac.uk/chmd/.
Best wishes
Rachel Simpson
Administrator/Outreach Officer
Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease
Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University
Queen’s Campus, University Boulevard
Stockton-on-Tees TS17 6BH
Tel: 0191 334 0700
A message from the Project Archivist at the RCOG , Clare Sexton:
The top-level descriptions of organisational records of the Royal College of Midwives are now searchable via the Archives Hub: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/.
This is the direct link to the overview to the collection – https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/c099b9b5-6451-3c4c-a67a-8e994f80d2e9
Kind regards,
Clare Sexton
Project Archivist
Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
27 Sussex Place
Regents Park
London
NW1 4RG
020 7772 6263
Listen to Helen King discussing Hippocrates on ‘In Our Time’ with Melvyn Bragg (and Vivian Nutton and Peter Pormann). Broadcast on Radio 4 on 15/09/11; now available via the BBC website.
With thanks to Tania McIntosh for signposting this programme on MIDWIFERY-HISTORY.
The RCM has now transferred its archives and library books to the RCOG library in Regent’s Park, London.
The archives have been catalogued, and anyone wishing to view the material is invited to contact the temporary archivist, Clare Sexton, at the RCOG.
The draft catalogue is now available to De Partu members via the Members’ area of the website.
Some of the De Partu steering group members were recently invited to the RCOG, and enjoyed viewing some of the material. Clare is working on some resource guides to the collection that will soon appear on the RCOG website: http://www.rcog.org.uk/what-we-do/information-services/resource-information.
Some of the speakers: Professor Cathy Warwick, Dr Janette Allotey, Professor Helen King and Canon Julia Allison, with Claire Sexton (temporary archivist who has catalogued the RCM archives). Launch of the Royal College of Midwives archives at the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists library, Sussex Place, Regent's Park, London. November 4th 2011.
The collection is now completely accessible to RCM members. Others are welcome to view them in the reading room at the RCOG by prior arrangement. Clare can arrange for items to be retrieved in advance of your visit.
The catalogue will soon be freely available via the Archives Hub: http://archiveshub.ac.uk.
We are informed that the Robin Gibb episode of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ will now be shown on Wednesday 21st September 2011 at 21:00. This is due to changes being made to the schedules by the BBC.
Wall to Wall Media (the producers) hope that you will be tuning in.
The company has expressed thanks to De Partu and members of the MIDWIFERY-HISTORY JISCmail list for the assistance given to the researchers for the Robin Gibb episode, in which one of Robin’s ancestors, who was a midwife in Salford, is to be featured.
The work of Don Shelton, featured in his article ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes‘, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 103 (2010) 46–50., where he claims that the eighteenth-century men-midwives William Smellie and William Hunter had women murdered to order, to provide the illustrations for their impressive atlases of obstetrics, has given rise to considerable controversy.
Helen King discusses his work in a recent article ‘History WIthout Historians? Medical History and the Internet‘, Social History of Medicine, published online ahead of print 8th June 2011, which she has based on a paper delivered at the De Partu colloquium held in Manchester in June 2010. She argues that Shelton’s claims raise fresh questions about how medical history is generated, presented and evaluated in the media and, in particular, on the internet. She traces the generation and subsequent reception of what, for some, has now become a ‘historical fact’, in order to illustrate how attempts by medical historians to engage with policy and with the public exist alongside a shift towards the deprofessionalisation of history.
On the 29th of April, which is the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp, the exhibition “They gave us hope again” was opened at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. The exhibition is dedicated to an historical aspect of the Dachau Concentration Camp which has received only little consideration hitherto: the fate of female prisoners, among whom there were also pregnant women. Between December 1944 and February 1945, seven Jewish women brought children into the world amidst the terror at Kaufering I, a satellite camp of the Dachau Concentration Camp – all of them survived.
While pregnancies were not uncommon in concentration camps, women and their children were usually murdered. In order to clarify the exceptionality of these seven mothers surviving in the murderous concentration camp system, the exhibition implements the stories of the persecution of these women in historical context.
The biographies of the women are presented in seven parts: life before deportation, arrival and imprisonment at the concentration camps Auschwitz and Plaszów, transfer to the Dachau satellite camps, their experiences as female prisoners, the discovery and handling of their pregnancy and the births of their children at Kaufering I, the conduct of the SS, the evacuation of the camp and their liberation in Dachau as well as their lives after the Holocaust. All seven women were from Hungary or from regions annexed by Hungary and were already pregnant at the time of their deportation. They survived the selection process at Auschwitz and other concentration camps until arriving at the Dachau satellite camp Kaufering I in early December 1944, after discovering the pregnancy. They brought their children into the world there under catastrophic conditions.
After giving birth, the mothers Eva Fleischmannovà, Sara Grün, Ibolya Kovács, Elisabeth Legmann, Dora Löwy, Magda Schwartz and Miriam Rosenthal formed a so-called Schwangerenkommando (pregnant unit) and were forced to work in the prisoners’ laundry. As late as 13 March 1945, the head SS camp physician at the Dachau Concentration Camp issued an order for the mothers to be transferred to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. The order, however, was not carried out.
The exhibition can be visited from 30th April 2010 to 31st May 2011.
Guided tours for groups through the exhibition can be requested under: bildung@kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
Alte Römerstraße 75
85221 Dachau
