[The end of home delivery midwifery in German-speaking sections of Upper Italy]

The German language islands in Northern Italy are a string of remote mountain villages stretching from Aosta in the west to Friuli in the east. These villages were founded in the middle ages by settlers from present-day Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The descendents of these settlers, almost all of them farmers, speak antiquated form of German and have maintained traditions that have long died out in the countries of their ancestors. The transformation from home births attended by the midwife to hospital births attended by a gynecologist took place in rural Italy in the 1960s. The aim of this study was investigate how this change took place in the language islands in their combination of geographical and linguistic isolation. The language islands of Macugnaga (Novara), Luserna and Val Fersina (Trento), the 13 Communities (Verona), Sappada (Belluno) and Timau (Udine) were visited and semi-structured interviews with midwives and other inhabitants in German dialect and in Italian were tape recorded. Home births accounted for almost 100% of all births in the language islands in the 1950s and ceased to exist after 1973. The German-speaking population stayed longer with home births than the Italian inhabitants of the same villages. Several reasons, practical and to a lesser extent psychological account for this behaviour: until 1962 the farmers' insurance policy did not cover hospital births, extensive road building to make the villages accessible all year round began after the flood summer of 1966, the inhabitants of the language islands felt they were considered as a backward rural minority in the hospitals of the towns.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)