Browsing all posts in "obstetrics".
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 [...]
Sacerdotal Medicine
While we make fun of premodern medicine, regularly and promiscuously (and are about to start making fun of early modern medicine, regularly and promiscuously), it is important to keep reminding ourselves that there is an end to the madness. Modern medicine has reduced our maternal mortality from 6 out of every 1000 women (the number [...]
Graverobbers R Us (but if we can’t find the right corpses…)
Medicine has a long (several thousand year) history of graverobbing. You see, for most of the history of medicine, examining actual bodies has been considered, well, sacrilege. And that didn’t even come from the monotheistic tradition (although the Torah made the rules about dealing with the dead very clear)–it dates all the way back as [...]
Anything a Woman Can Do, A Man Can Do Better
Somewhere around the 17th century, a new class of obstetric practitioners developed, first in England and then spreading to the Continent. They called themselves man-midwives. The theory was that those uneducated women who had been practicing midwifery for generations (millennia) were just too stupid to actually do a good job. It took a man. We [...]
The Curious Case of the Pig Farmer and his Wife
The infamous Caesarian Section, so named not because it saved the great politician from an early death (Julius Caesar was born by normal means) but because it was codified into law in the Roman Empire, was, sadly, the option of last resort through the dark and middle ages. It was common practice to attempt to [...]
Dawn
To recap: The Middle Ages, enlightened as they were compared to the Dark Ages, really didn’t have much on ancient Rome or Greece. Learned medicine was based on Galen and Hippocrates, who could do no wrong and knew all. Plebeian medicine was in the hands of the midwives, those folk heroes of the day who [...]
That’ll Teach ‘Em
Everyone knows the story of how the Spanish explorers, near the end of the middle ages, conquered the New World with a combination of fire power and smallpox. Honestly, how else could a handful of guys, even with guns and priests who had their God on their side, destroy large and fruitful ancient civilizations such [...]
How to Fake Virginity, Medieval Style
In “On Treatments for Women,” Trota says that, before we treat a woman, we need to know whether she is hot or cold. The test is easily performed. Soak a piece of lint tied on a string in pennyroyal oil, tie the string around one thigh, and insert it into the vagina while the woman [...]
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 [...]
Madame Trota Tells it All
Quick recap: Europe, stuck in the dark ages, has only a few second hand medical texts from the good old days of Rome. Mostly Hippocratic “common knowledge” rules the day; Soranus, that great obstetrician of antiquity, has been largely forgotten; Galen has disappeared into the Byzantine Empire. Sudden contact with the Arab world during the [...]
