The "Young Birth-Helpers": Obstetrical Education at the Chicago Maternity Center, 1934-1971

The Chicago Maternity Center provided obstetrical services for the medically underserved on Chicago's Near West Side for nearly eight decades (1895-1974). While its founder's vision, its outreach to underserved communities, the reasons for its decline, and the perceived abandonment of the community when it closed have been well documented, less attention has been paid to the role of trainees in providing obstetrical care. Medical students and residents routinely delivered babies in patients' homes, often without adequate supervision. This aspect of the center's history can help illustrate the evolution of experiential education in clinical medicine, along with emerging concepts of equitable access and quality of care. This work explores the center's role in medical education in light of contemporary perceptions of some participants-trainees, faculty, and institutional leadership-and through analysis of scholarly and popular publications, institutional archives, and communications with alumni and retired faculty. The popularity of the experience with trainees and its constituents, segregation of the center's activities from those of the sponsoring medical center, and its well-respected history led to the persistence of a model for clinical medical education that was an anachronistic remnant of earlier approaches to education and to care for the poor and disenfranchised.