This essay examines the maternity ward records in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico in order to understand the hospital as a space where mothers, doctors, and midwives encountered one another and the State, and where they sought to legitimize and define the field of medicine at a time when childbirth practices were contested and in flux. In spite of their different views of the body and healing, they also created medical treatments and new habits from these gendered and multiethnic encounters. The hospital became an important site for these groups to legitimate their work, craft their identities, and contest the work of their rivals. This essay makes a case for both understanding the hospital as a site for the production of a profession and as a place where the boundaries between “folk medicine” and professional medicine and between “local” and “universal” medical knowledge were interwoven.
