Martha Ballard Diary...A Midwife's Tale

 Martha Ballard

This is one of the pages from Martha Ballard’s diary from 1785. This diary is an important piece of history in relation to nursing. Martha Ballard was a midwife who assisted not only on the delivery of children since there were no hospitals or as many doctors that would attend the delivery of a child. One of the factors that her diary provides is the names of the people she assisted and the successes on her deliveries. The diary accounts also for advances in healthcare.

Attached is a link to an online version of the diary in which it talks about daily routine activities she had in her days while caring for others and also as well as the weather so we are able to picture a day in her life. The online episodes of the diary, talks about an episode and time in which doctors started using medication opium to be exact in the form of drops; during the deliveries. The diary says the medication put the patients in a “stupor” and did not allow them to push and be participants in the delivery. The story also describes situations in which patients had been harmed by the use of the medications. These episodes upset the midwifes a lot especially Martha Ballard in this case since she would be dismissed once the doctor would arrive and receive no payment but also upset because she felt confident to be able to deliver the children without medication and harm to the child or the mother which at that time was hard to do.

The diary is also a tool of reference for the changes that have come about in our healthcare situation, it clearly describes that doctors were many times trained by the midwifes for the deliveries, they were savvy in theory but not on actual hands on situations and they learned from the midwifes.  The diary documents the “worse epidemic in Massachusetts, Oxford, in which diphtheria ran through the town” according to the diary Martha writes that on August 13 of 1769 the epidemic started in the town, she herself lost three of her daughters within the first few weeks of the epidemic and she was pregnant with a child at the time. They moved from Massachusetts during the American Revolution to the front lines of Maine.

With this document being a primary source of history especially in the area of medicine since documentation was very difficult to pass or to find this diary has been a very efficient and helpful way of referring to an era in which America was growing and many changes were occurring. The story about Matha's ordeal has now been made into a movie and there are many books that have been created from it. As secondary sources we can now benefit from the information and learn from it and enjoy from the material in it. Learning about the many changes this country has gone through with its strugles in health and how much we have grown and evolve yet we are still so much dependent on this type of information to keep learning. I hope you all enjoy this information as much as I did.

Here is the link also for a website in which you can see actual copies of the diary and the difficulty with which they were read, and transcribed.

Diary of Martha Ballard

A midwife's tale the movie

Here are a few more pictures of that diary but you can see more in the links above: