nothin A New Midwife In Town | New Haven Independent

A New Midwife In Town

There’s a new midwife in town! Her name is Mrs. Gibb and she comes from New York, highly recommended and with years of experience.

It seems that even back then, Oct 1. 1786, according to a notice in that day’s New Haven Chronicle, our citizens, including those about to give birth, looked up to the far bigger if still colonial-small city to the south.

To hear about the eminent phyficians [sic] in that city [New York]” who recommend Mrs. Gibb for all your birthing needs, click on the audio below or find the latest episode of This Day In New Haven History in iTunes or any podcast app under WNHH Community Radio.”

My regular guest on the show, the New Haven Museum’s Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, didn’t think that our city back then could boast of anything like a hospital. Yale’s College of Medicine, which ultimately gave birth to Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNNH), would not appear until the 1820s.

So Mrs. Gibb — the word obstetrix” means midwife in Latin — was likely in demand for the home births that were the norm in early New Haven. Not that much has changed: today YNNH/St. Raphael’s midwifery practice attends to approximately 30 births a month.

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