Centres for attending delivery in Madrid in the 19th century
At the beginning of the 19th century, Madrid, unlike other European capitals like Vienna and Paris, had no important maternity wards in large hospitals. Towards the middle of the century, the only centres to admit women in labour were the «Casa del pecado Mortal» (House of Deadly Sin), run by the Real Hermandad de María Santísima de la Esperanza, a ward with fifty beds for women in labour in the Hospital General, and the clinics in the Medical Faculty. They were all of limited size and intended for women who had conceived «illegitimately», women who wished to abandon the baby after birth and women of «licentious lives».
In 1859, the Casa de Maternidad de Madrid joined the above centres. It was located in an independent building in Mesón de Paredes street, but again had few beds and rather inadequate hygienic conditions. In fact, when hygienist Phillip Hauser y Kobler (1832-1925), a fellow countryman of the regent Queen María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena, visited the Casa de Maternidad in 1901, he got a bad impression which he criticized severely in his book Madrid desde el punto de vista Médico-Social (Madrid from a Medical-Social perspective). During his visit he was able to witness a delivery in which the woman in labour was sat on «an armchair with a crescent-shaped seat, covered with glued fabric». In Hauser´s opinion, both the chair and the midwife in attendance as well as the woman in labour seemed rather indecorous, and the centre lacked the minimum standards of hygiene which were considered necessary for such centres at the time. It seems that Hauser´s opinion had great influence on Queen María Cristina, as we shall now see.