When I told friends and colleagues that I was writing a book about the professionalization of modern German midwifery and that my timeframe covered the last decades of the nineteenth century through to the first half of the twentieth century, I was greeted by surprise on both sides of the Atlantic. In North America, colleagues grew concerned that I was opting to examine something that did not exist. Assuming a narrative of modernization framed by the situation in the United States and Canada, many argued that I had the wrong time period; I should move things forward a century to look at remerging interest in natural childbirth coinciding with the growth of the women's movement and second wave feminism. This advice was predicated on the idea of a linear progression of scientific achievement marked by the struggle between male obstetricians and female midwives. In this view, a societal infatuation with science-as-modernization allowed medical men (those formally educated in institutions of higher learning), to usurp the position of birth attendant from traditional lay women whose expertise was acquired through an informal, unregulated apprenticeship of hands-on training. Accordingly, it was not until the rise of second wave feminism in the 1960s that some, predominantly women, began to protest loudly and publically about how depersonalized and invasive the process of delivery had become. This led them in turn to search for a return to holistic women-centred birth experiences and a renewed interest in midwife-assisted home deliveries. For proponents of this view, the re-emergence of midwives marks a break with the scientific trajectory of medical modernization because midwives represent a return to traditional (read: non-formalized, non-institutional, non-book based) methods of childbirth.

By contrast, associates in Germany, while pleased with my interest in German culture, could neither understand why the professionalization of midwifery was such a novel topic, nor how it would hold any interest for a readership beyond those occupied with questions of general medical professionalization.