After spending her childhood and youth in Rodi, a small village in the north of canton Ticino, Maria Pozzi – born in 1920 – decided to embark on a new adventure to become a midwife. She took the train to St. Gallen, where she spent three years training at the Frauenklinik, already helping deliver her first babies.
We met her in 2022, at the retirement home where she was residing, for a conversation about her professional experience. In a bag, she still had her professional tools, which helped her deliver a total of 1978 babies. All their names are carefully written in a small black booklet: among them is also Francesca Coppa Dotti, who led the discussion, a midwife too.
Maria Pozzi returned to Leventina in 1955, where a midwife was needed in the hospital of Faido. She worked there until 1971, delivering many babies for the wives of the Monteforno workers. It was a job she carried out alone, except in difficult cases, when a doctor would come from Bellinzona. And it was in Bellinzona itself that she later worked for the last ten years of her career before retiring.
Over her long career she witnessed many changes: from the delivery room in St. Gallen with space for four women separated only by a curtain, to the transition from the wooden obstetric stethoscope to the electronic device that even allowed the mother to hear the baby’s heartbeat, and finally the arrival of the first ultrasounds.
Maria Pozzi passed away in August 2022, and left her midwife bag and its content to the local museum, as keepsake of how babies were born a hundred years ago.
An excerpt of our portrait was published by Swiss public broadcaster RSI on the International day of the midwife:
This portrait was commissioned by the Ticino section of the Swiss federation of midwives.