About
Scottie Buehler,
Midwife & Historian
Mobilizing lessons from the past for reproductive justice today.
While working as a homebirth midwife in Austin, TX, Dr. Scottie Buehler encountered contradictory stories about the origins of obstetrics from both midwives and obstetricians. Contemporary midwives in the U.S. exchange stories lamenting the male medical usurpation of the historically female domain of midwifery. These narratives typically take on a timeless quality that grants modern midwifery legitimacy: “women have always cared for each other in childbirth.” Conversely, in the halls of hospitals and sterilized prenatal rooms accounts of the horrors and deaths of bygone childbirths echo and justify an uncritical championing of medicalization. Through these stories, Dr. Buehler came to realize how historical narratives buttress modern professional divisions, naturalize inter-professional conflict, and determine membership in a community. Yet, in practice, many midwives foster positive relationships with, and, when births deviated from physiological norms, rely on OB/GYN colleagues. For their part, many doctors decry the over-medicalization of childbirth. Surely, Dr. Buehler speculated, the past was equally complex. She started to read extensively in the history of midwifery outside her fulltime medical practice. Historical questions welled up and motivated her wish to become a historian of medicine.
Today, Dr. Buehler’s desire to interrogate the role of historical narratives in constructing professional boundaries motivates her research on early modern midwives. She uncovers the multiple paths to midwifery for early modern women and the complex relationships between them and other practitioners. Her research on enslaved and rural women highlights the heterogeneity of early modern midwives through attention to class, racial, religious, geographic, and legal differences. Midwives are not and have never been a homogenous group with shared goals.
Dr. Buehler earned a PhD in the history of science, medicine, and technology from UCLA in 2020 and is an Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Medical and Health Humanities program at Sam Houston State University. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Association for the History of Nursing, Chateaubriand, Huntington Library, and National Library of Medicine.