Mission to Mothers

Sister Theophane and Sister Michael, wearing the blue-grey habit of the Medical Mission Sisters,* arrived in Santa Fe, N. Mex. one bleak November day in 1943. The sisters had not come for the scenery. They were there because of a grim fact: Santa Fe County had the highest infant mortality rate (111 per 1,000) and the second highest maternal death rate (over 50 per 10,000) in the U.S.

In all New Mexico (pop. 500,000), there were two obstetricians. The two nuns, graduate nurse-midwives themselves, teamed up with one of the obstetricians,

Dr. Nancy D. Campbell, opened a maternity institute.

Among the women in the adobe huts of town and desert, many of whom had never had medical help in delivery, word soon spread of a newfangled, less frightening way to bear children. For a $10 fee ($15 out of town), the sisters gave mothers a six-week, prenatal course at the institute, taught them how to make cribs and look after babies, attended their labor and delivery. By jalopy and on foot, Sister Theophane and Sister Michael (later joined by Sister Patrick and Sister Helen), traveled day & night across the rough desert, often curled up in sleeping bags outside adobe huts while they waited for the baby to come. But there was more to their job than that.

They took difficult delivery cases to St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe. For baby care, they organized a "Well Child Clinic." They started a school for midwives. They persuaded Santa Fe citizens to meet deficits by contributions, got the Federal Government to pay hospital expenses.

Last week, the sisters totted up the results of three years' work: they had delivered 419 babies, lost none of the mothers, only two of the babies (both born with syphilis).

-Founded in 1925 in Washington, D.C. by a physician-nun, Mother Anna Dengel, the Medical Mission Sisters now have 170 members, maternity hospitals in India, England, Atlanta. They conduct one of the three schools for midwives in the U.S. The others: Kentucky's Frontier School of Midwifery, Manhattan's Maternity Center Association.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.