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83 books match the query 'Birth' and 2 start with f

cover of First Fruits: The Lewellings and the Birth of the Pacific Coast Fruit Industry

First Fruits

The Lewellings and the Birth of the Pacific Coast Fruit Industry

Linda Ziedrich

Oregon State University Press, 2025

2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

First Fruits offers a fascinating look at the lives of Pacific Coast horticulturists Henderson, Jonathan, and Seth Lewelling. Traveling across the Overland Trail—Henderson to Oregon in 1847, with a wagonload of fruit trees, and Seth and John to California three years later—the brothers would establish themselves as pioneers in the West’s growing fruit industry. By recounting how Henderson planted the first orchard of grafted fruit trees in Oregon, how Seth originated the Black Republican and Bing cherries, and how John led the development of the Napa Valley wine industry, First Fruits preserves the Lewellings’ place in history.

However, the Lewellings were not simply planters, grafters, and breeders. They were also adventurers, colonists, gold seekers, reformists, and explorers—experiencing firsthand the westward expansion of the nation. Their stories provide a unique glimpse into the social, economic, and political history of the day. From their Quaker upbringing in North Carolina and Indiana to Henderson’s attempt to start a utopian colony in Honduras, John’s efforts to grow the Grange in California, and Seth’s contribution to democratic reforms in Oregon, the Lewellings’ legacy extends far beyond their agricultural endeavors.

In the first biography to reclaim the brothers’ histories, Linda Ziedrich splendidly captures their dedicated support of one another and their communities, their contributions to the development of the modern fruit industry, and their lasting influence on the cultivation of fruits synonymous with the Pacific Coast region.

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cover of From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology

From Midwives to Medicine

The Birth of American Gynecology

McGregor, Deborah K

Rutgers University Press, 1998

From Midwives to Medicine examines the development of modern medical treatment of women and the related history of women's health in the mid-1800s. McGregor looks not only at the medical figures who devised and practiced the innovative therapist, but also at the history of the patient experience in the development and the professionalization of a medical specialty. In exploring the controversial career of J. Marion Sims, "the father of gynecology," and the history of the Woman's Hospital of the State of New York, McGregor chronicles the emergence of a practice involving previously untried medical techniques and the use of experimentation on patients according to a social hierarchy based on race and sex.

Using patient records and archival material from the female governors and administrators at the hospital, From Midwives to Medicine shows how a new medical practice developed out of the changing patterns and historical experiences of childbirth, as well as out of the context of the social relations f the sexes. Sim's patients were slave women in the antebellum South, poor Irish immigrants in the industrial North, and upper-class white. Protestant, Manhattan socialites who sought help for their "hysterical" symptoms. During his career, which began in the South and flourished at the Women's Hospital in New York. Sims performed and perfected his technique to "cure" vesico-vaginal fistulas, the tears of childbirth, from which so many women suffered. But Sims achieved these successes on the operating table only after years of practicing his "silver suture" technique on unanesthetized slave women, who he believed "by the nature of their race... had a specific physiological tolerance for pain unknown to whites."
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