Here is a little bit about the history of midwifery discussions
on the
Internet:
Per Betsy Hyde, as of Sept., 2019, this is the history:
sci.med.midwifery
Warwick
Fensende
Alaska list
Sage
The first public reference I could find to the warwick
list was
this
announcement
of a discussion of the proposed newsgroup, sci.med.pregnancy,
with the midwives list as one of the other groups to be posted:
From cudma@csv.warwick.ac.uk Thu Jun 2 15:58:53 1994and the first actual post I could find was a discussion of . . . SURPRISE . . . the types of midwives! (Thank goodness we've gotten past those tedious discussions!)
From: Denis Anthony <cudma@csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Subject: RFD: sci.med.pregnancy. . .
The following groups will be posted :-
. . .
and to the midwives list :-
midwife@csv.warwick.ac.uk
. . .
Subj: Re: Empirical & Direct Entery Midwife (Homebirth Page)Wow! Here's an even earlier one - about cabbage leaves!
Date: Sun, Dec 18, 1994 8:53 PM EDT
From: jlegacy@u.washington.edu
X-From: jlegacy@u.washington.edu (Janis Legacy)
Sender: midwife-request@csv.warwick.ac.uk
To: tau@macbel.be (Anne Kesteloot & Patrick Hublou)
CC: midwife@csv.warwick.ac.uk (Mailing-list)
Date: Fri Jun 24 13:49:50 PDT 1994
Subject: Re: preventing beastmilk engorgement
To: MIDWIFE.csv.warwick.ac.uk
May 6, 1996 - list moved from warwick to fensende.
This welcome message from 1998 gives a little bit of the history of the handover from the warwick list to the fensende list:
"Midwife used to be maintained by Denis Anthony but as of
Monday
6,
May, 1996 it is in the hands of Sabrina Cuddy and
majordomo,
an
automated listserver."
[Note that in this welcome message, it refers to the original home of the Midwife Archives on fensende.com, since Sabrina Cuddy was running her own server and had both the disk space and the bandwidth to house the Midwife Archives. It wasn't until I got my own window-based workstation in January of 1998 that I started my website at gentlebirth.org and started hosting a lesser-used mirror site for the Midwife Archives. And, in case you're wondering, I started working on turning my midwifery notes into The Midwife Archives, in April, 1997, when Sabrina Cuddy convinced me that it was "easy" to make web pages. I think the first delivery of The Midwife Archives was made by bike delivery on diskettes, when I was still editing raw HTML in emacs on a 24x80 screen and then testing them on a friend's computer running Windows.. My first record of shipping files to Sabrina on the Internet was 13 Nov 1997, The decision to make gentlebirth.org the primary home of The Midwife Archives occurred on Friday the 13th of February, 1998, and then Sabrina kept a mirror site at fensende.com for another year or so, and then the bandwidth at gentlebirth.org was sufficient to go solo.]
In one of the great synchronicities of life, Sabrina Cuddy lived on Warwick St. in Redwood City, CA.. (Another synchronicity is that Sabrina actually used to live in Mountain View, CA, about 12 houses away from Ronnie Falcao, the editor of these web pages, the Midwife Archives, but they didn't meet until after Sabrina had moved to Palo Alto, about a block from Faith Gibson.)
There was also a public list, sci.med.midwifery, which allowed
midwives
to engage in discussion with members of the public about
midwifery.
Here's the
FIRST
CALL FOR VOTES for sci.med.midwifery. I find it somewhat
quaint
that midwifery was defined as "The practice of obstetrics by
midwives".
We've come a long way, baby!
From: Michael Handler - view profileand this message further named names, i.e. those who had volunteered as moderators:
Date: Tues, Sep 12 1995 12:00 am
Email: hand...@sub-rosa.com (Michael Handler)
Groups: news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, sci.med, misc.kids.pregnancy, misc.kids, soc.women, sci.med.nursing, alt.folklore.herbs, alt.support.breastfeeding, misc.health.alternative, misc.kids.health
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Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse | Find messages by this authorFIRST CALL FOR VOTES (of 2)
moderated group sci.med.midwiferyNewsgroups line:
sci.med.midwifery The practice of obstetrics by midwives (Moderated).
MODERATION INFO:* Mr. Bernhard Muenzer <m...@gsf.de>
* Ms. Cheri Van Hoover <Cher...@aol.com>
* Ms. Deirdre E.E.A. Joukes <065...@pc-lab.fbk.eur.nl>
* Ms. Marjorie A. Dacko <WVUY...@prodigy.com>
* Mr. Patrick Hublou <phub...@innet.be>
* Ms. Sabrina Cuddy <swny...@remarque.berkeley.edu>
Again, this Call for Votes was also cross-posted to the warwick
list.
My
first
public midwifery posting was on this list - Mon, Nov 27 1995