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Contents of midwifery set L0076055 Wellcome Images
The danger of motherhood
In 2007, UNICEF estimated that 99 per cent of the half a million women who die every year as a result of pregnancy complications or during childbirth live in developing countries, with one out of every 16 sub-Saharan African women likely to die in childbirth.
The home of midwifery
Midwifery was a recognised profession in ancient Egypt and, as the Old Testament reports, it was midwives who Herod ordered to carry out his murder of the innocents. The first recorded school of mid- wifery was set up in the Temple of Neith at Sais, and Egypt’s modern School of Midwives was estab- lished in 1832, before those of many other countries. As chief instructor in the 1860s, female midwife Sitt Tamurhan even taught obstetrics to male medical students.