African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory

African American Midwifery in the South: Dialogues of Birth, Race, and Memory. By Gertrude Jacinta Fraser. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. xii, 287 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00852-9.)

The anthropologist Gertrude Jacinta Fraser aptly describes her study of African American midwifery in Virginia as a "requiem to the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that have been lost." In her well-written account, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Virginia community, she explores what she sees as the tragic, purposeful destruction of African American birthing practices in the South in the first half of the twentieth century.

In documenting what was lost, Fraser turns to government records and medical literature, where she finds a coercive relationship between health officials and midwives. Doctors and nurses, she laments, had no interest in identifying the useful,...