Browsing all posts in "midwives".
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 noose-like [...]
She’s a Witch! May We Burn Her?
[This post is slightly out of order. But it is Halloween season, so I couldn't resist.]
As the dark ages drew to a close, the Church suddenly got into the medicine business. Which meant that men were suddenly competing with those medicos of the dark ages, the midwife.
Midwives in medieval Europe often treated the entire village. [...]
