[Midwifery education: apprentice or student?]

The article focuses on the history of midwifery education in Northern Germany and the changes male surgeons and doctors have brought up with their presence in the teaching of midwives. Before the academic doctors Georg David Bössel (born 1704) and Johann Georg Nessler (died 1804) started midwifery schools in Flensburg and Altona (1765) a woman was a trainee of a midwife, when she wanted to learn the profession. As early as 1731 Jacob Leonard Vogel (1694-1781) in Luebeck gave some theoretical lessons as an addition to the apprenticeship. When Christian Carstens (1781-1814) became midwifery teacher in 1805 he succeeded within short time to exchange the "old" midwives of Luebeck with younger midwives who only had learned practical obstetrics in a delivery ward. Of course the new pupils learned less as the apprentice in former times as they only delivered very few women and didn't experienced the conditions under which women gave birth to their child in their own home and with their own birth setting. Nevertheless the state officials accepted this new method of teaching as a norm and established a new midwifery school in 1805 attached to the University of Kiel.