1890

Opening of NY Midwifery Dispensary on Broome Street (called the Outdoor Department of the Lying-In Hospital), which provided OB care to nearly 50,000 women (a majority of them Russian Jews) on the Lower East Side (Dye, 549, 552) and provided students & MDs with experience in home delivery. . . . the Broome Street doctors consciously worked to systematize obstetrics and to integrate scientific knowledge with everyday practice. . . . This new relationship was predicated upon patients’ acceptance of doctors’ authority. . . . Doctors’ refusal to give midwives a role in the management of birth helped establish a relationship in which only the physician could be regarded as a source of support and expertise (558) . . . the dispensary cases, incontrovertibly document women’s enthusiasm for medical care. Most early dispensary patients do not seem to have had difficulties accepting the terms of the new doctor-patient relationship. . . . By late nineteenth-century standards, the Midwifery Dispensary physicians did provide care that was superior to that ordinarily available to women of any social class” (559).