Martha Ballard

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.