Product Description

For over two decades, HEART & HANDS has been a beloved guide for both midwives and parents interested in the benefits of midwifery care. This all-new fourth edition has been revised from start to finish, featuring updated material that emphasizes independent midwifery, physiologic (natural) birth, and the art of nonintervention. Midwifery expert Elizabeth Davis includes valuable hints for turning breech and posterior babies, mediating pain in labor, and supporting newborn physiology. Davis also reveals the keys to postpartum recovery, with practical tips on breastfeeding for busy mothers. Comprehensive and compassionate, HEART & HANDS remains a dog-eared classic for parents, midwives, and other birthing helpers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16584 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Amazon.com
Elizabeth Davis's Heart and Hands, though subtitled A Midwife's Guide to Pregnancy and Birth, is not just for midwives. It's an excellent and thorough resource for parents-to-be who are thinking about delivering their child with a midwife, or who are concerned about the medical establishment's over-control of birth. (Two previous editions sold more than 100,000 copies and there are nowhere near 100,000 midwives or midwifery students to buy this book, proving that parents-to-be have looked to this resource for options.)

Completely updated in the third edition, Heart and Hands is a practical guide, textbook, and reference that is both hands- and hearts-on. Davis, a long-time, well-known midwife, gives how-to details on all aspects of midwifery practice, including prenatal care, problems in pregnancy, assisting at births, labor complications (including a devastating and beautiful description of a stillbirth by midwife Shannon Anton), and caring for the entire family postpartum. Each chapter has a special section "for parents," but expectant parents can use all of Heart and Hands to get as much knowledge as possible about their upcoming experience.

From the Publisher
* Thoroughly revised and updated fourth edition of the classic text for midwives, also useful for expecting parents, nurses, childbirth educators, doulas, and other labor helpers.

* Features new diagrams and photographs, updated midwifery forms, and an expanded resource list for parents.

* Expanded sections on GBS, VBAC, gestational diabetes, and water birth address current controversies.

* Previous editions have sold more than 150,000 copies

About the Author
ELIZABETH DAVIS has been a midwife, women's healthcare specialist, educator, and consultant for more than 25 years. She has served as a representative to the Midwives Alliance of North America for five years, and president of the Midwifery Education Accreditation Council for the United States. She co-directs the recently accredited National Midwifery Institute, and teaches and lectures internationally. She resides in Sebastopol, California.

Customer Reviews

To the person who said: More pronography then medical guidance
This reader has an issue with a woman's whole body. In many birth books all you see is from the wasit down like the woman is not a whole person. When we focus on the whole picture (a womans torso, breasts and FACE!) we remember this isn't a birthing machine that needs fixing; this is a person, a woman, a mother.

GREAT book
I would recommend this book to anyone pursuing a natural birth. It helped me to understand many of the things that my midwife did, as well as to have faith in the strength of my body. Reading this before labor helped me to make it through 20 hours of back labor without even so much as an aspirin. I would highly recommend this book to parents-to-be!

More pronography then medical guidance
While certain anatomical photos are certainly necessary to help explain birth, this book goes way beyond medical visuals and seems to have gone out of its way to include pictures that border on pornography. There's even diagrams that were amended to include "details" clearly not necessary to serve as an effective visual aid. Moreover, why it is necessary to have so many waistup shots of women's breasts and pretty blatnat ones to boot when a baby comes out of the body waist below is beyond on us. We tried at first to ignore the pictures and read the book, but it just got so obscenre for us, we shelved it with plans to throw it away. Men buying Penthouse will definitely like this book!