1. His writings in the 5th century BC included a description of normal birth.  His mother was a midwife.

2. She was a midwife aboard the Mayflower who attended three births during her trans-Atlantic passage.

3. In 1513, he wrote Der Schwangern Frauen und Hebamen Rosengarten, known as "The Rosengarten", the first widely translated book on obstetrics.  In the preface of the book, he berated midwives of the time for their ignorance and superstition.

4. She was a midwife and healer in Charlestown, MA, tried and hanged for witchcraft in 1648 (before the Salem witch trials).  Villagers charged she had a malignant touch that could cause deafness and nausea.  They claimed that she could foretell the future and that she had a witch's teat.

5. She was a midwife to royalty.  In 1609, she published the first medical treatise on childbirth and women's illnesses written by a woman, Diverse Observations on Sterility; Loss of the Ovum after Fecundation, Fecundity and Childbirth; Diseases of Women and Newborn Infants, in which she offered the following advice:  "You should wait for the time which God has ordained"... "never make or allow others to make any noise in the room of a woman giving birth, during or after the birth"... "You are called in with the sole task of helping and serving her."

6. In 1671, she wrote the first English text written by a midwife. The Midwives Book or The Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered.  The text included anatomy, diagnostic tests, and herbal treatments.  She argued for women's expertise in birth and advised against intervention except in extreme cases.

7. She was a Dutch midwife who attended the births of over 4,000 babies including 64 twins and 3 triplets.  She kept records of all the women she attended in a series of nine notebooks.  They provide a valuable social record as they include, among other things, information on the occupation of the husband and the amount she was paid for each confinement.  Her published memoirs are based on her recollection of 122 of the most serious and interesting cases.

8. A midwife appointed by Louis XV to teach at hospitals throughout France, she devised a teaching method where mannequins were used to demonstrate the positions of the fetus and mechanisms of labor.  Her book, Abrégé de l'Art des Accouchements (Summary of the Art of Childbirth), published in 1769 features color plates of delivery techniques.

9. A man-midwife praised for his devotion to caring for the lower classes of London's East End.  He taught obstetrics in his home, giving over 280 courses to more than 900 pupils in the mid-1700s.  This his Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery based on over 1,100 deliveries, and his A Sett of Anatomical Tables, With Explanations and an Abridgement of the Practice of Midwifery,  he exerted wide influence and became the foremost obstetrician of the 18th century.

10. She began as a teacher of childbirth education, then began acting as a labor coach for her students, and eventually began attending home births in the capacity of "birth assistant".  (She did not charge any fees.)  When OBs in her area because refusing prenatal care to anyone planning a home birth, she helped found a cooperative Birth Center.  Her book, the Birth Book, published in 1972 - a full five years prior to the better known Spiritual Midwifery, another product of the midwifery/childbirth movement of the 1971s - chronicles the first year of the Birth Center's operation.  In its introduction, she writes, "This book is a collection of intimacies...  it is not a manual for doing home birth yourself, instead it is a book proselytizing for family centered birth and self-directed birth."