Difference between revisions of "325--Week 2 Questions/Comments"
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I enjoyed reading the Midwife's Tale. The fact that midwives made up a large part of the community's healthcare, not just with obstetrics, in the 18th and 19th century is something that is overlooked. Though scorned by many male doctors, midwives were needed for their homeopathic remedies, such as using herbs and common vegetables to cure a patient's ills, contrasting with the doctor's elaborate medicinal remedies. The irony of this is midwives were perhaps more sensible in their treatments than the so-called professionals of the day. This makes sense as many of the most basic tools that doctors use today, like the stethoscope, hadn't been invented. It was also nice to read about how one of the midwives attended autopsies and such, this of course being well before the Victorian age of restricting women due to their delicate natures. --Lauren Milner | I enjoyed reading the Midwife's Tale. The fact that midwives made up a large part of the community's healthcare, not just with obstetrics, in the 18th and 19th century is something that is overlooked. Though scorned by many male doctors, midwives were needed for their homeopathic remedies, such as using herbs and common vegetables to cure a patient's ills, contrasting with the doctor's elaborate medicinal remedies. The irony of this is midwives were perhaps more sensible in their treatments than the so-called professionals of the day. This makes sense as many of the most basic tools that doctors use today, like the stethoscope, hadn't been invented. It was also nice to read about how one of the midwives attended autopsies and such, this of course being well before the Victorian age of restricting women due to their delicate natures. --Lauren Milner | ||
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| + | My favorite essay this week was Peter H. Wood's "Slavery and Arts in South Carolina." When we think about slavery, we generally associate it more so with plantation slavery in the 1800s working out in fields planting, weeding, and harvesting (unskilled labor). Yet this was not the universal case then, and especially not earlier on in the 1600 and 1700s. The notion that slaves were actually skilled laborers who had specific jobs that were vital to the success of their master's plantation makes a lot of sense to me- though I never considered it in great detail before. I think that the most interesting part of Wood's essay was his discussion on how many times slaves became apprentices (often to whites) for skilled labor and were then sold at higher prices to other plantations because of the specific skills that they had acquired. Again, it makes sense that whites would mention their slaves' skills at the slavery block, but it's something that I hadn't thought that much about prior to reading Wood's essay. -Bryan Lees | ||
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| + | In response to the ongoing discussion about French's "Irishmen and Spades, 1859" I'd like to offer an idea that I think has already been inferred a bit in previous posts. While some people naturally do work better with tools best suited to their physical stature or to the specific environment they're working in, it seems natural to me that French, writing in 1859, would naturally have certain presuppositions and stereotypes of "Old World" immigrants. Irish immigrants and Irish Americans fought in the Civil War to protect their new homeland (North or South) in part to show that they were U.S. citizens. Thus, it doesn't surprise me that French may have presuppositions as to which tool is most efficient in the hands of people of different ancestries. A lot of it reinforces communal identity of what it means to be Irish, Scottish, etc. in the face of persecution for not being "American" and in attempts to retain communal heritage as socialization occurs. -Bryan Lees | ||
