A team of international contributors give new insights into the key issues surrounding women's health, social anthropology and midwifery. They examine bodies, leakage and boundaries, illuminating the contradictions and dilemmas in women’s healthcare.

1. Language and Status: The Disappearing and Reappearing ‘Midwife’ 2. Genetic Traits as Pollution: The Case of 'White English' Carriers of Sickle Cell/Thalassaemia Traits 3. Midwives: Defiling Women! Section 2: Leakage and Labelling 4. Containing the Leaking Body: Female Incontinence and Formal Health Care 5. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Older Women and Early Miscarriage 6. "I Just Felt Really Dirty": Women’s Responses to a Diagnosis of Chlamydial Infection Section 3: Breastfeeding as Pollution 7. ‘Resisting the Gaze’: The Subversive Nature of Breastfeeding 8. The Pollution of Objective Scientific Practice by Anecdotal Stories of Personal, Vicarious or Cultural Experience: The Denial of Embodied Knowledge 9. Not in Public Please: Breastfeeding as Dirty Work 10. "Milk for Africa and the Neighbourhood" but Socially Isolated 11. Breastfeeding: A Time for Caution Section 4: Midwives and Dirt 12. Birth Dirt 13. Pollution and Safety – Controls of a Secular World 14. Drained and Dumped On: The Generation and Accumulation of Emotional Toxic Waste in Community Midwifery Section 5: History: Containing Birth Pollution 15. A Clean Front Passage: Dirt, Douches and Disinfectants at St Helen’s Hospital, Wellington, New Zealand, 1907-1922 16. The Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth: A Blessing in Disguise? Section 6: Dais 17. Rethinking ‘Pollution’— Understanding ‘Narak’ 18. Dais’ Work in Gujarat, India 19. The Dirt has to Come Away 20. Pollution and Women in Sickness, Health, Birth and Work