Get Me Out Making Babies Though the Ages

Go Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank
By Randi Hutter Epstein
Hardcover, 302 pages
Due west. W. Norton & Company
List price: $24.95

Informational: This excerpt includes bailiwick matter of a sexual nature.

Eve'southward Doing: Nascence from Antiquity through the Heart Ages

Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating hurting during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted past the serpent's claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God's fury, he transformed the serpent into a abdomen-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, "I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in hurting you shall bring along children."

The thought pattern was fix. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for hurting relief during the nativity of her twins. Attitudes did not alter much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Well-nigh people idea they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn't endure the desperation of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without hurting meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. Just only somewhat.

Eve, of class, had a lot more to remember about than labor pains. She was the simply woman in the history of the planet to go through pregnancy without any communication, solicited or otherwise. We don't know whether Adam was nagging her to swallow certain things or avoid others, just given how easily she manipulated him into eating an apple, it doesn't seem like he was the 1 wearing the pants in the human relationship. Eve had no one. No mother. No guidebook. No friends with their ain nascence stories. Instead, she suffered the penalization. Despite the dire consequences — having to squeeze babies through an impossibly teeny orifice — she populated the world, launching 1 of the greatest traditions of womanhood: feminine determination. She got to have her apple tree and her babies, besides.

Equally soon every bit her daughters and her daughters' daughters reached childbearing age, none of them would always experience pregnancy without a bombardment of words of wisdom. We seek them. They seek us. Who did Eve'due south children turn to? Our ancestors did what women have been doing all forth. They turned to each other and self-proclaimed birthing gurus. They turned to medical men, the presumed pillars of knowledge. The literate few could read guidebooks — rather, guide papyri. You may call back life was easier for our corking-great-not bad-grandmothers, given the narrow range of advice. But from their perspective, information technology was a dizzying whirligig of practice-this-don't-do-that.

Nascence from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls thing orchestrated past men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a human to enter the commitment room, still they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed downwards over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made batter of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Most everything was nigh skillful sexual practice and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not elementary. As far back as 1500 BC, probably fifty-fifty earlier, women had admission to all sorts of explicit information about sexual practice, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.

What women went through back then, the whole experience, must take been ane big guilt trip. Should annihilation have gone wrong, there were so many reasons to blame your own behavior. Did I do something that deserved God'southward curse? Was I drinking also much wine? Did I harbor evil thoughts?

If yous were lucky to be in a city, you lot may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if yous were in the rural outback, y'all may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, yous were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act equally hostess and serve the aptly coined "groaning beer" and "groaning cakes." Friends of the laboring adult female were called "gossips," as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You tin presume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit down around and talk about other people. And so what was once an epithet for "close-to- God" morphed into a term for "behind-the-dorsum chatter."

For the start millennia or and so, women relied on the same traditions written and rewritten, told and retold, with very lilliputian change. Centuries subsequently Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen were long dead, doctors were rewriting their words of ancient wisdom with lilliputian thought to the fact that the wisdom may be outdated. Medical authors were scribes, not enlightened experts, and certainly non investigators. Pregnancy advice in antiquity was virtually the same as the communication doled out generations later to medieval women. Sometimes experienced midwives learned a thing or ii to tweak the process, merely the books did not change.

Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to potable (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to chest-feed and when to mitt the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex considering a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were besides told not to have also much sex because information technology wears out the baby-making machinery. That'south why "whores have so seldome children," one guide said, because "satiety gluts that womb." In France, pregnant women rarely left the firm after night considering they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.

1 guidebook prescribed his and hers cocktails to up the odds of having a boy: reddish wine tainted with pulverized rabbit'southward womb for him; red wine with desiccated rabbit'due south testicles for her. Were couples truly doing shots of this stuff? We'll never know. But couples who wanted children — or preferred 1 sex to some other — were willing to try anything. Think near the hormones we're shooting ourselves upwards with today. Maybe dried testicles wasn't and then weird afterwards all.

France's sixteenth century queen Catherine de Medici had the money and wherewithal to get all kinds of medical advice and handling when she could non become pregnant. She chose first her folk healer, who told her to potable mare's urine and to soak her "source of life" (vagina?) in a sack of cow manure mixed with ground stag's antlers. The king was never sexually attracted to his wife. The dung diaper could non have helped the state of affairs. Eventually, de Medici went to a doctor who diagnosed the teenage royals with physically defective reproductive organs. He had a unlike cure in mind. No one knows what it was, merely it worked. They went on to have nine children. In between the folk and medical wisdom, she tried her own tactic: she allowable her servants to drill a hole in a flooring and so she could lookout man her married man have sex with his mistress and learn a thing or ii most baby making. Perchance that did the trick.

Despite the drove of advice manuals, we really have no thought whether our great-great-great-grandmothers followed advice doled out by mothers, midwives, or medical men. Did they second guess their doctors when their mothers told them something else? Did they read the pregnancy books or just let them collect grit on a shelf ? If Eve is supposed to be a female representative, a role model of sorts, so peradventure in that location is something innately feminine to questioning authority. You have to presume that nosotros have always balanced experts' suggestions with the advice given by friends and mothers, not to mention our own gut instincts. What was written in the books, then, may not tell the story of birth in antiquity, but it expresses what was important to women and caregivers about the birthing process.

The great thing about consistent medical knowledge is that doctors could reprint their books forever. Today's medical textbooks are outdated past the time they go to press. Soranus was a famous Greek physician who wrote the definitive volume on gynecology in the 2nd century. Information technology was the leading text for the next thousand years. Not a bad run. The kickoff role was matchmaking advice. He told men how to cull a fertile partner. Here's what to look for: a cheerful woman who is not mannish or flabby; a woman who digests food easily; a adult female who does non have chronic diarrhea. Constipation, according to the volume, suffocated the fetus. Diarrhea washed it away. Or, equally he put it, women with chronic bowel issues would never be able to "lay concur of the seed injected into them." It's a wonder how men approached the subject area of bowel movements on the commencement date. Soranus besides told men to date a normal woman with a normal uterus. No further advice about how yous figured out who had the normal uterus or what constituted a normal uterus in the first identify — or, for that matter, what constituted a normal adult female.

Soranus thought moderate drinking a good thing, but too much was dangerous. He believed that your thoughts molded the growing baby, so if you got drunkard and had oddball fantasies, you lot would have weird children. At that place was proof. He said one women thought about monkeys during a drunken sexual escapade and her kids turned out hairy. On the other paw, an ugly human being from Cyprus made his plain-Jane spouse stare at a cute statue during sex. Wouldn't yous know it? They had gorgeous children.

Sex during pregnancy was considered unsafe to the growing fetus because it tuckered a adult female's vital juices that should period to the baby. Also much intercourse acquired children who would be "defective in vital and other qualities, ill tempered, sickly, and short-lived." Smart parents made smart children, but again, only if they did not have as well much sex activity. Otherwise their trivial ones, though born with higher than normal intelligence, would be weaklings and die before the historic period of 10. Equally always, moderation was key, just no one said what was the normal amount of sexual activity.

Soranus wrote about positions and maneuvers to up the odds of conception. He also gave birth command advice, that is, how to have sex without conceiving: After your partner ejaculates inside of you, hold your breath, forcefully sneeze and and so drink ice-common cold water. If that failed, he recommended Hippocrates' abortion remedy: boot your heels into your buttocks until the seed drops out.

He as well promoted do-it-yourself dwelling pregnancy tests. Many tests relied on urine chemicals, much similar today. He told women to urinate on a bouquet of wheat, barley, dates, and sand. If the grains sprouted, you were pregnant. If wheat grew, it was a boy; if barley, a daughter. The sex selection may take been nonsense — maybe not — but perhaps the surge of the pregnancy hormones fertilized the sprouts.

Many of the earliest women'due south health books were written by monks, the very people who had the least utilise for the information. One book instructed men to get women in the mood past rubbing her betwixt vulva and anus. What adept this did monks is everyone's guess. I of the most popular monk guides, Women'southward Secrets, or De Secretis Mulierum, has been translated from the original text into modern language past Helen Rodnite Lemay, a medieval scholar. Every bit she sees it, the book not only doled out health advice, only showed what some of the smashing thinkers, including Hippocrates, Aristotle, Soranus, and Galen, thought nearly women. In a nutshell, non much. She also showed that while wellness care was a combination of philosophy and medicine, philosophers and doctors perceived the human body and the cures in vastly different means.

Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank past Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 past Randi Hutter Epstein. Used with permission of the publisher, W.Westward. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805624

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