Accouchierhaus

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In 1751, on the initiative of Albrecht von Haller, the first university maternity hospital in the German-speaking area was set up in Göttingen . At first she was housed in two rooms of an old hospital for the poor. In 1791 a modern and generously equipped new building was moved into. The above register sheet shows this Göttingen Accouchierhaus, built between 1785 and 1791 as the “Royal Maternity Hospital”; Copper engraving as a journal sheet by Johannes Carl Wiederhold

Accouchierhaus (from French accoucher "to give birth") or Gebranstalt (also maternity house ) is the name given to a forerunner of today's maternity clinics that was built in the 18th century.

meaning

The main purpose of the maternity hospitals, which emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was to train doctors and surgeons to become obstetricians ("Accoucheuren"). Many governments and the public were convinced in the course of the Enlightenment that male medical graduates could provide better obstetrics than the traditional midwives who had previously mastered this field. Maternity institutions, especially universities, should provide students with opportunities for practical training. Secondly, the Accouchierhäuser served to train midwives through medical obstetricians. The third priority was to support women in need at the end of pregnancy, during childbirth and during the puerperium. Until the early 20th century, the vast majority of women who gave birth in a maternity hospital were unmarried. Most of them were taken care of free of charge. In return, they had to make themselves available as exercise objects for the training of students and midwifery students. Friedrich Benjamin Osiander , who was director of the Göttingen University Maternity Hospital from 1792 to 1822, said that the patients were seen as “living phantoms” (training dummies).

The main reason they turned to obstetrics was that they could save the lives of mothers and children, which was endangered by the allegedly ignorant midwives. The maternal mortality rate in the current conducted by doctors Entbindungshospitälern was usually much higher than for domestic deliveries that were consistently cared for by midwives.

literature

  • Henrike Hampe: Between tradition and instruction. Midwives in the 18th and 19th centuries in the university town of Göttingen (= contributions to folklore in Lower Saxony 14 = series of publications by the Folklore Commission for Lower Saxony eV 14). Schmerse, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-926920-23-8 .
  • Axel Karenberg, learning in bed with pregnant women. On the typology of the maternity hospital in Germany, 1728-1840. Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie 113 (1991), pp. 899-912.
  • Walther Kuhn , Ulrich Tröhler (eds.): Armamentarium obstetricium Gottingense. A historical collection on obstetric medicine (= Göttinger Universitätsschriften. Series C: Catalogs 1). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1987, ISBN 3-525-35874-1 .
  • Marita Metz-Becker: The administered body. The medicalization of pregnant women in the birthing houses of the early 19th century. Campus, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1997, ISBN 3-593-35747-X .
  • Katja Regenspurger: The woman as the object of obstetrics: Accouchierhauspolitik and female self-image around 1800 , in: Julia Frindte (ed.): Spaces of action of women around 1800 (= event Weimar-Jena 10). Winter, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-8253-5027-4 , pp. 77-90.
  • Jürgen Schlumbohm, Living Phantoms: A Maternity Hospital and its Patients 1751-1830 . Göttingen: Wallstein 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1093-3 .
  • Jürgen Schlumbohm: The doctor's gaze, or: how women giving birth became patients. The maternity hospital of the University of Göttingen around 1800. In: Jürgen Schlumbohm u. a. (Ed.): Rituals of childbirth. A cultural history (= Beck'sche series 1280). Beck, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-42080-X , pp. 170-191.
  • Peter Schneck: Establishments. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 462.
  • Stefan Wolter: "An Accouchier Hospital would soon replace this deficiency". From “women's art” to science: the development of obstetrics in the 18th and early 19th centuries using the example of Eisenach. Journal of the Association for Thuringian History 53 (1999), ISSN  0943-9846 , pp. 113-150, (also on the Jena maternity hospital).

See also

Web links

Commons : Accouchierhaus  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jürgen Schlumbohm: Saving Mothers' and Children's Lives? The Performance of German Lying-in Hospitals in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Volume 87, 2013, pp. 1-31.