Authors

Discussion

Famous male physician-writers in Tsarist and Revolutionary Russia described their most harrowing medical cases in narrative form. Works such as Anton Chekhov’s  “A Case in Practice” and “On Official Business,” Vikenty Veresaev’s Memoirs of a Physician, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Notes of a Young Doctor forced the Russian reading public to confront issues of patient care and medical ethics through imaginative and cultural, as opposed to scientific, means. Female medical professionals, however, are typically excluded from this broader conversation; while many women doctors and trained midwives did make writing a part of their careers, they tended to focus on medical research and training materials, not storytelling.

My paper explores an intriguing exception to this general rule. The first journal for professional midwives in the Russian Empire, entitled Akusherka, encouraged trained midwives to tell their stories in print for a wide audience. Published primarily in Odesa by Polish doctor and obstetrician Piotr Mikhailovich Ambrozhevich from 1890-1913, the journal included several sections over its print run that invited professional midwives to write in with their personal experiences. This was especially important for those who worked in rural or remote districts, far away from the professional support networks that urban centers were able to provide. Consequently, midwives from all over the Empire, including Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine, in addition to Russia, contributed their own “cases in practice” so that a wide readership could better understand the conditions they worked under. I argue that many of these pieces were written with the desire to captivate, surprise, and entertain, as well as to educate. These midwife-writers pursued a form of communication that was more than just mere information sharing; it was literature. Their stories contain honed narrative pacing, richly drawn characters, and complex thematic developments. In this connection, I analyze these pieces as medical short stories which reveal the moral and ethical dilemmas midwives faced in their practices and prompt creative reflection on healthcare issues in their readers.