The Midwife They Called a Witch

In 1913, an Italian midwife named Rosalia G stood before the New York City Board of Health, accused of being a witch. She was no witch. She was the only reason many immigrant children were alive at all. Rosalia lived in East Harlem and worked in the cramped tenement apartments where no doctor would go. She arrived to each birth carrying the same simple kit: towels, herbs, a small kettle, and a rosary. For the immigrant families packed into those buildings, she was not merely a midwife — she was the only help they had. But the newspapers called women like her foreign healers — untrained, dangerous, even witch doctors. Licensed physicians refused to defend her. Politicians were eager to push immigrant midwives out of the profession entirely. And when a baby died in a freezing tenement apartment — the building had no heat — the landlord pointed at Rosalia. The Board of Health moved to revoke her license. Outside the courthouse, something remarkable happened. Italian mothers gathered. Women she had delivered. Women whose babies she had saved. One stood up and shouted in broken English: she is not a witch. She is the only reason our children live. After hours of testimony from the very community she had served, Rosalia was cleared. She walked out exhausted, clutching her worn medical bag — and went right back to work. She delivered babies in those tenements until 1934. History tends to remember the doctors. The institutions. The men with degrees and offices. But women like Rosalia — Italian immigrant women who worked without recognition, without protection, without even a building that had heat — they are the ones who kept whole communities alive. Their names deserve to be spoken.