Martha Ballard was an American midwife and healer who practiced in Hallowell, Maine, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, delivering more than eight hundred babies over roughly three decades without formal medical training. She is known chiefly through the detailed diary she kept from the age of fifty until shortly before her death, which recorded not only her medical work as a birth attendant and herbalist but also her role as a witness in community and legal disputes. Long overlooked, her diary was recovered as a major historical source by the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, whose 1990 study of it, A Midwife's Tale, established Ballard as a documented window into the working medical life of an ordinary woman on the early American frontier.
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Ballard was a New England midwife whose diary, kept from 1785 to 1812, records roughly eight hundred births she attended along with other maternal and family medical care.
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1. Wikidata: Martha Ballard
- Wikidata Q6774333, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
- Wikidata P569 (w-bbfill-medicine3-0926)
View the Source2. Wikipedia: Martha Ballard
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Martha Moore Ballard (February 9, 1735 - May 7, 1812) was an American midwife, healer, and diarist.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do historians value Martha Ballard's diary?
It is a rare, nearly three-decade record of a colonial frontier woman's daily life and work as a midwife.
Ballard, an American midwife, healer and diarist, kept a diary with hundreds of entries over nearly three decades, which was unusual for the time. Historians treat it as an invaluable source on the lives of colonial frontier women. It became widely known through the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's 1990 book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary.
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