Imagine, if you will, (sorry, men -- speaking to the women here) if you never saw the face of the physician who delivered your child. In fact, what if you didn't even know he was there? Instead, you would assume it was your midwife alone who assisted at the birth.

In the 19th century in Price, this happened more than once. Local physician J. K. W. Bracken recounted how he "on more than one occasion officiated at a difficult childbirth, without seeing the face of the new mother, or revealing his own identity or presence by footfall or sound of voice."

Given the modesty ethic of Victorians, it's likely that male doctors elsewhere in Utah also tiptoed into the birth room.

In fact, Utahns seemed to have been even more fastidiously modest than Americans in other parts of the country. Women had a deep aversion to the thought of male physicians assisting them at childbirth, even under anesthetic or in the throes of dire complications. Curiously, young polygamous wives were often more reluctant than first wives in submitting themselves.

Husbands also hated the idea of a male doctor presiding at a delivery. That would be a defilement of privacy and home -- as offensive, one account suggests, as a "strange man" visiting his wife's "bedchamber" for other reasons.

So it went that midwives predominantly, almost exclusively, assisted with childbirth in Utah. A midwife called on the help of a male physician only in rare cases, when the lives of the mother or child were truly in jeopardy. But even then the doctor kept his presence anonymous.

These medical practices reflected the prevailing attitudes about sexuality in Utah society. Victorian morality stressed chastity before marriage and fidelity within, to be sure. However, some couples may have supplemented this maxim with further restrictions.

To William H. Smart, Mormon leader in Uintah County, the marriage relationship required not only fidelity but also "modesty and decorum." Even a kiss between spouses must be no more than a "token of pure affection." He privately counseled with his wife that they should refrain from "mutual exposures, before each other, of our persons either in bathing, dressing, undressing or otherwise."

Smart's attitudes may have been extreme. But still, this couple's practices reflected the basic attitudes of the day. So how could a woman unclothe her body for a male doctor if she was reluctant to show it to her lawful husband?

Earlier in the century, Brigham Young made clear his own conviction that women alone should assist mothers as they gave birth. In 1873, at the urging of women's leader Eliza R. Snow, he supported that conviction by helping to send Romania B. Pratt and Ellis Shipp to the newly opened Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. (Mormon Relief Society women sent money to help support the two.)

Upon finishing their medical training, both women returned to Utah to set up practices and also to train more women by offering classes in nursing and obstetrics. In 1875, Young sent 20 more women to be medically trained.

The work of these women brought a decline in neonatal fatalities. The number of women doctors gradually increased until, according to Claire Noall, the Utah Territory may have had a larger percentage of them in proportion to the population than anywhere else except Russia.

During her 60 years of practice, Shipp delivered more than 5,000 babies. She also worked at the Deseret Hospital, which opened in 1882, mostly to serve women. The territory's women had raised money to open this hospital, and the staff of ten included only two men.

However, by the last decade of the 19th century, more and more eastern-trained male doctors were arriving in Utah and consulting with female doctors. These consultations helped to establish the confidence that Utah women needed to at last begin accepting male doctors into their birth chambers.

Kristen Iversen and Holly H. Rogers can be reached at kristenri@yahoo.com

Sources » Utah Historical Quarterly, volumes 10 and 61; journal of William H. Smart; Beehive History 6