LIFE photo essay: Maude Callen, Nurse Midwife

On a more upbeat note, we can witness the ministrations of a healer made famous by Smith (who suffered severe shrapnel wounds as a photographer in World War II). In 1951, while on the staff of Life magazine, he followed a remarkable certified nurse-midwife, Maude Callen, as she made her rounds in rural South Carolina, not only helping women to deliver their babies but also attending to the general health-care needs of an impoverished population. Her profession, more akin to that of a physician than of a simple midwife, was created in the early 20th century by public health doctors and nurses.

In Smith's impassioned pictures (he was of the old-fashioned activist breed), we see Callen delivering a baby; teaching a class of midwife trainees; vaccinating children; comforting a paralyzed man in a wheelchair who weeps at her soothing touch; and racing to a distant hospital in the vain hope of saving a dying infant. In one incident, photographed in a segregated hospital, Smith himself gave blood for transfusion to a moribund infant. Callen, an African-American, helplessly stood by as a white doctor botched the procedure and nurses complained about a white man giving blood to a black child.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/ar...gn/26body.html