Plaque on the midwife’s door

Plaque on the midwife’s door
Circa 1950. Plaque announcing midwife Josefina San Martín Lanchas, a former student at the School of Midwifery at Santa Cristina. Photo by Dolores Ruiz-Berdún © Dolores Ruiz-Berdún

Plaque on the midwife’s door

Before delivery became widely institutionalised, when many midwives still assisted deliveries at home, it was important to make yourself known so as to drum up enough clients to be able to make a living. Advertising strategies consisted in classified ads in the paper and different types of sign on their houses so that people who needed them could find them easily. The most frequent strategy was to use enamelled plaques which were fixed on the wall, although word of mouth was essential for these professionals, too. If a woman was satisfied with the midwife who had assisted with her delivery, it was usual that she not only counted on her for future pregnancies, but also recommended her to family and friends. However, the progress made by the social security and the generalisation of hospitalisation for delivery complicated things for midwives who assisted home births.

In the photo we can see the plaque which Josefina San Martín Lanchas placed on her front door (doorbell and all). Josefina, born in Avila, was admitted to the Casa de Salud de Santa Cristina in October 1948 as a day student. When she had completed her studies, instead of returning to her hometown, she settled in Madrid like many other midwives who studied at Santa Cristina. Josefina is another example of the process of institutionalisation undergone by midwives in Spain: almost twenty years after qualifying as a midwife, she sat an open competition exam to obtain the post of midwife in the Social Security healthcare system. In 1970, she was working on the maternity ward of «La Paz» hospital, which had opened on July 6 1965.