- Wed Aug 30, 2017 9:52 pm
#39031
Hey there, biskam, let me see if I can help you through the process of analyzing this question, like a midwife helping you through the birthing process.
First and foremost, don't get hung up on what is meant by the term "midwife", because in the context of this passage it simply does not matter what a midwife is! Focus instead on what we can glean from the context of the passage about midwives.
We can tell from the information in lines 5-8 that a midwife is a type of woman medical practitioner, because historians have equated the two. We can tell from several lines that follow that they were not the only type, and that others (non-midwives) included "physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, and other healers". So none of those are midwives, but they are "woman medical practitioners". We might infer from the info in lines 35-42 that midwives are not part of the "learned" medical professions and are among those that are "on the legal and social fringes of medical practice".
Beyond that, do we know anything about them from the text of the passage? No, and therefore we don't need to know more. Midwives might be people that lance boils for a living, or they might be caregivers who attend to the elderly as they lay dying, or they make herbal teas that help the immune system fight off infection, or they might be people who assist women in childbirth. For the purposes of analyzing the logic, structure, and viewpoints of the passage, the definition of "midwife" is wholly unimportant!
What is important is understanding that, as stated above, they were NOT the only women practicing medicine of some sort during the time period being studied. They were just a subset, fewer than half of them all according to one study. That is what should get you to answer B here - "Woman medical practitioner" is a category, "midwife" is a subset of that category, just as "science" is a category and "biology" is a subset of that category. That's the only answer that has that "set/subset" relationship.
If a term is left undefined in a passage, as may happen especially (but not solely) in law-related or science & technology passages, then you don't need to know what it is, other than to understand what it is in context. Don't let a lack of understanding of such jargon or terminology interfere with your analysis of the underlying structure and reasoning of the passage, the viewpoints, the tone, the arguments, and the main point.
Keep pushing!
Adam M. Tyson
PowerScore LSAT, GRE, ACT and SAT Instructor
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https://twitter.com/LSATadam
