On June 14, 1760, Martha Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine, began the diary she would keep for 27 years — a document that would record 816 births, medical treatments, community life, and the daily labor of women in early America.

Ballard was not a nurse or physician. She was a midwife with decades of practical training and a network of knowledge passed between women across generations. She attended complicated deliveries, treated infections, prepared medicines from plants, and laid out the dead.

She recorded all of it. The diary runs to nearly a million words.

For two centuries, it sat largely unread in archives, consulted occasionally by genealogists. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discovered it in the 1980s and realized what it contained: not just birth records but a complete picture of a woman's working life, medical practice, community economy, and the labor of reproduction that made colonial American society function.

Ulrich's 1990 book A Midwife's Tale won the Pulitzer Prize. It retrieved Ballard from two centuries of obscurity.

Ballard continued working as a midwife until she was 77 years old. She died in 1812. Her diary ends ten weeks before her death.