Essay about Literature and Traditional Midwives

Submitted By libbymc
Words: 354
Pages: 2

Anthropology 310/ February 17, 2015/ 3:56 PM She Is No Stranger: The Traditional Midwife In Egypt Soheir Sukkary Stolba

THEME: The potential problems integrating the traditional midwife, Dayas, into Egypt's modern health care system. I.
Introduction
A. Doctors and health planners have made little effort to incorporate traditional midwives into their development scheme.
B. Descriptive ethnographic data provided by medical anthropologists increasingly emphasizes the importance of the role performed by traditional midwives in Third
World countries.
C. In the health sectors, modernization meant making modern medical health services available to as many people as possible.
D. In recent years there is an increasing interest in the use of dayas among urban middle class women so much that they are consulted by pregnant women and they supervise home deliveries.
II.
Who are the “Modern Dayas” of Egypt?
A. Midwifery is a profession often passed along by mothers to their daughters.
B. In order to speed up the delivery Um Ashraff would cook the mother a meal that consisted of eggs prepared with oil and garlic.
C. Um Ashraff also mentions that in the old days some dayas used to ask women to drink a glass of melted butter to speed the delivery.
D. To get rid of their old image and look like a modern knowledgeable women, dayas go to the hairdresser and a seamstress, and learn modern mannerism as culturally defined, to gain acceptance.
E. Dayas