Browsing all posts in "labor".
The Sports Exclusion
Parenting pop quiz! In what era were children: Sent out to work in intense heat hours each day Pushed beyond the limits of their little bodies by taskmasters bent on getting the most out of them Routinely injured, puberties delayed, occasionally killed Often addicted to injurious substances just to get through their working days If [...]
In Pain Shall She Bring Forth Children
Whoever wrote that book of ancient folktales we call the “Old Testament” was intent on explaining how things came to be. Within her explanatory notes, we find that tale of Adam, Eve, a certain serpent, and an apple. Why a kind, decent, loving God would stick a tree in the middle of paradise with a [...]
The Family Business of the Forceps
Before the seventeenth century, when a baby wouldn’t come out, your choices were limited. Since antiquity, the preferred method of dealing with a stalled labor was podalic version. Most midwives, we think, could perform podalic version, in which the baby was turned from head-down to foot-down. This gave the deliverer something to grab onto. Various [...]
Why Don’t We Stock Pepper in L&D?
“When God the creator of the universe in the first establishment of the world differentiated the individual natures of things each according to its kind, He endowed human nature above all other things with a singular dignity, giving to it above the condition of all other animals freedom of reason and intellect. And wishing to [...]
Greek Maternity, or Why French Aristrocrats Cut Off Their Left Testicle
I promised you the history of motherhood, and by golly, that’s what you’re going to get. Hippocrates believed that the uterus had two sides, possibly with a septum in the center. While this is present in approximately 3% of the human female population (and does not appear to affect fertility), it is not considered normal [...]
The Divine Mother and Child–NefHxMotherhood
The earliest written medical books we have date from the ancient kingdom of Egypt, 6000-1200 BCE. As you might well imagine, they are a little different from ours. For one thing, the Ebers papyrus, one of the oldest of the lot (1534 BCE) is a 68-foot scroll. Not the easiest reference volume. For another thing, [...]
The Couvade (NefHxMotherhood)
cooljinny, stock.xchng.com Exactly when man figured out that he had some involvement in this magic thing called “birth” is lost to the pages of history. By the time we get to written records (ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia), man had not only found his role, but he had completely co-opted it. Man, in his great wisdom, [...]
Demons, Caves and Death (NefHxMotherhood)
Prehistory is, as its name suggests, before written records. Prehistoric birth rituals, are, therefore, lost to time. Anthropologists look to primitive contemporary cultures, with little or no exposure to Western medicine and philosophy, to try to fill in the gaps. This, unfortunately, is as fraught with hazards as childbirth itself. Even the great Margaret Mead [...]
The Nefarious History of Motherhood
In the beginning….
The gods were women.
There are still vestiges of this in our modern culture. “Mother Earth.” “Mother Nature.”
