District nursing associations and doctors: aspects of interprofessional relationships, 1902-1914.

District nursing associations' midwifery was the key to their early twentieth-century growth, which would have been impossible without doctors' co-operation. Yet doctors were reportedly hostile to district nurses in this period, and had particular reasons for resisting their midwifery. Here it is argued that the Queen's Institute's co-ordination of the associations' work, and its conduct of negotiations with the British Medical Association, promoted arrangements under which doctors were likely to gain more than they feared losing by accepting district nurses' midwifery.