Midwife Biblio Annotated Bibliography Entry:

Midwife Biblio

Annotated Bibliography Entry: "What is Midwifery? Role and Types of Midwives"

This information in this article relates to midwife generally and in the United States specifically, incorporating its medical, legal, and spiritual/philosophical elements in a comprehensive and brief overview. The comprehensiveness of the article is, of course, necessarily in inverse proportion to its brevity, but despite working against this logical paradox the author does an adequate job of summing up the history and practice of midwifery in a relatively short space. This is perhaps the only elements of the article that can be deemed wholly successful, however, and many of the other issues present in the article make it of questionable value to anyone attempting to truly educate themselves about midwifery. This value is decreased further if the article is to be considered for research purposes due to serious questions concerning the reliability and validity of the information.

The first and highly consistent indicator that this article is not of first-rate (or really even of second-rate) quality is the poor sentence structure (the last sentence of the first paragraph is a subject fragment without a verb), the use of cliched and almost meaningless phrases ("fast forward to today" and "Midwives were the first...holistic practitioners of the past" are examples that immediate leap out; though there intended meanings are clear, they are rather vaguer meanings and poorly worded sentences), and simple mistakes in spelling and grammar (such as the use of "through out" as two separate words). Though scholarly writing need not be the most eloquent or well formed, it should at least adhere to the basic rules of the language in which it is being published, and this article fails to meet this criteria despite maintaining a fair level of interest throughout the piece.

The liberties that the author took with the English language, however, are very likely indicative of liberties taken with the information presented in the article itself. The claim, for instance, that "midwives were...the first holistic practitioners of the past" is highly suspect. Leaving aside the elusive meaning of being the "first of the past" in something (we will assume the author simply meant, "the first"), it appears as though the author is trying to say that midwives were the first known practitioners of natural medicine, or perhaps of complimentary nature- and inquiry-based practices. This claim might be true, though given the knowledge of very ancient medical practices it seems unlikely, but the author does not provide any citation or even a scrap of supporting evidence or comparison to establish this idea. The claim is made, and then the paragraph moves on. This is not the way that solid research or a standard logical progression is presented, and the lack of any citations or references of any kind make this article especially suspect.