Called to practice : African American "grannies", midwives, & health reform African American "grannies", midwives, & health reform African American history month lecture Midwifery -- history Black or African American History, 20th Century Midwifery -- education Introduced by Dr. Elizabeth Fee, chief, History of Medicine, National Library of Medicine, Sheena Morrison discusses the training of African American midwives in the rural south. Prior to the 1920s, most African American midwives in the South became midwives by apprenticeship (usually to a familial relation), or because they believed they had a spiritual calling to do so. After the Sheppard-Towner Act was passed in 1921 the only way to become a midwife was increasingly through recruitment to one of the state-sponsored midwifery training programs by a public health nurse. From the 1920s through the 1960s this next generation of midwives continued the tradition of their "granny" predecessors with the added benefit of scientific medical knowledge. Drawn mainly from NLM's American College of Midwives Collection, this presentation tells the story of "granny" midwives and the state and local training programs that educated them and succeeding generations. A clip from the film "All My Babies" (1952) was shown. Questions were taken after the lecture. Credits: Presenter, Sheena Morrison. Transfer; Stephen Greenberg, public service librarian, History of Medicine Division; 20100315; Acc.#10-05. [Bethesda, Md.] : National Library of Medicine, 2010 Morrison, Sheena. National Library of Medicine (U.S.) Lecture Moving image 020 min. Sound Color Live action nlm:nlmuid-101527391-vid 101527391 http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101527391 OCLC: 632069772 English Southeastern United States The National Library of Medicine believes this item to be in the public domain: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/