Pious traders in medicine: a German pharmaceutical network in eighteenth-century North America

findings, Evenden dismisses almost completely. These texts, predominantly written by male medical practitioners, are, in her view, of little use to illuminate the world of female birth practice. She argues that male practitioners had hardly any obstetrical practice, and, with regard to the theoretical basis, their treatises present only an untidy mixture of useless Galenic or humoral theory, marred by superstition. Evenden's unwillingness to admit the limitations of her material enables her, however, to reconstruct a conflict-free female world revolving around the birth event. According to her, seventeenth-century London midwives were united in a "proud sisterhood", fully aware of their responsibilities and commitments to their sister midwives as well as their clients. In this happy world, men are "aliens", and male medical practitioners are constructed as incompetent and totally unskilled aggressors threatening not only the lives of helpless, pregnant women but also the livelihood of competent midwives. I am sceptical about the existence of such a "golden age of midwifery". Some recent studies have, for example, pointed out that the daily experience of midwifery was to a large degree shaped by tension, friction, and conflict occurring in the midwives' associations with other official and nonofficial midwives, with their apprentices and, ultimately with their patients. The work of midwifery differed widely in early modern Europe. Evenden's book has convinced me that concerning their training and economic status, the officially licensed seventeenthcentury London midwives were much better off than many of their colleagues on the continent. But how these women conceived their art and interpreted their role as women workers, as wives or widows, or active members of their community, remains somehow sketchy and superficial. This story still needs to be written.