My brother was born on the dance floor!

Ok, so that isn't my actual brother, but this is.
No, seriously, my brother was actually born on the dance floor. My mom taught ballet lessons in their house (I was not yet alive, so it wasn’t really my house) and had a room with a hard floor and mirrors that allowed for dancing. That’s just where she happened to be during delivery.

I think the dance floor looked something like this, but I wasn't alive yet, so I don't really know.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, my mother was assisted by a midwife.

All I really knew about midwives is that, if they are good at what they do, they can use their hands to move a child within its mother’s womb into the proper position, the head on the bottom, for delivery to occur. There’s a bit more to being a midwife than that.

Way back in the day, before hospitals or epidurals, women were the only ones to assist in labor in Egypt. This is ancient Egypt, and the all the sources I have examined say that no one is really sure what these women actually did, but there are records of them being present.I’m assuming they gave moral support and used the knowledge they gained from experience to help other women give birth.

In Ancient Greece, being a midwife was a profession, as it is today. However, men were not allowed to be present during birth, so the midwife was the one who ran the show, not the doctor. Midwives had assistants to help them with delivery process; they mostly held the mother in place. The Midwives job was to make the mother as comfortable and the delivery as easy as possible. They massaged and applied oils to the mother, talked the mother through the pushing process including directing her breathing, helped pull the baby out of the mother’s body, cleaned off the baby, cleaned of the mother, removed the placenta, cut and sealed off the umbilical cord, and wrapped the baby in bandages. Mothers of Ancient Greece gave birth while sitting on a crescent shaped stool, a stool the midwife brought with her to births, as they felt this was most comfortable. The early part of labor was spent on a hard table like bed and when delivery was close, they were moved to the aforementioned stool. If the mother was to week to move, they remained on the hard table/bed. The midwife guided the mother through all of these movements.

Historians are not sure how this knowledge was passed from one generation to the next, but they think it was probably either from mother to daughter, or through a system of apprenticeship.  A lot of the knowledge we do have about these ancient midwives comes from the writings of Soranus in his book Gynecology, in which, he critiques midwives preparations and procedures.

The article I read was interesting, just so you know.

Today midwives maintain the same basic goals as ancient midwives; they want to help make labor as comfortable and easy as possible.  Today’s midwives also try to keep births as natural as possible, so, if you want an epidural, stick with a doctor.  Most midwives today go through a certification program, but some simply learn through apprenticeship and field experience, it just depends on who you decide to hire.