The manuals for teaching theory to the students

The first manual used for teaching midwives in the Casa de Salud de Santa Cristina was Manual of Obstetrics. Minor Gynaecology for Midwives by Italian obstetrician Luigi MªBossi (1859-1919), translated into Spanish by hygiene inspector Nicolás M. Martinez Amador in 1925. In the picture we can see a copy of the book, property of Gregoria Villafría Arnáiz. It may seem surprising that a book by a foreign author was chosen instead of the Manual of Obstetrics for Midwives which José Torre Blanco, a Spanish gynaecologist, had just published in 1924. This choice was probably due to the rivalry between the author of the book and José Bourkaib Besó, sub-director of the centre.

In 1929 Salvat publishing group published a translation of German obstetrician Ludwig Piskacek´s book, which bore the same title as Torre Blanco’s, i.e. Manual of Obstetrics for Midwives. The book may have been used in the centre, but we have not been able to verify this.

Francisco Orengo Díaz del Castillo was undoubtedly the most charismatic teacher at the School of Midwifery at Santa Cristina during the post-war, and wrote a manual called Obstetrics for Midwives which was widely used by students at the school. The first edition was published in 1949, but there were three more, the second in 1953, the third in 1963 and the fourth in 1974. Given that deliveries at home persisted well into the 1960s, Orengo’s manual included a complete explanation about how to attend deliveries at home. The successive editions incorporated some of the novelties in the field of maternity, such as the technique for painless labour or the role of the midwife in gynaecological cancer. Nevertheless, the knowledge in the book was rather superficial and midwives who wanted more education had to use other, more thorough, books.