medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
This is interesting & coincides with what was presented in "A Midwife's
Story." My grandmother, who had 10 pregnancies, 10 live births, acquired
puerperal fever when her doctor tried to get the 9th baby born fast before
the other children got home from school. She survived, but before
antibiotics, it was a near thing. My grandfather, working 3 part-time jobs
in depression Alabama, got a medical authority to come down from Chicago to
treat her.
I'll look for your article.
DW
> Back when we were first starting women's studies (and it was possible to
> read nearly everything out there) it was fairly common knowledge that high
> rates of death in childbirth were a nineteenth century phenomenon.
> Puerperal fever was an infection caused by medicalization. Especially in
> hospitals, doctors carried infection on their hands from one patient to
> another and even in home births frequently infected women who would
> otherwise have survived. Somewhere in the seventies, Vern Bullough and a
> collaborator published an article in Speculum regarding the iron content
in
> the typical woman's diet, concluding that the loss of iron caused by
> childbirth would probably catch up with them around the third birth. Even
> so, there is no reason to think that childbirth caused any significant
> sexual imbalance.
>
> As I said before, twelfth century writers complained a lot about the
surplus
> of women. They blamed a noticeable rise in prostitution on negligent
> secular men, urging them to marry repentant women. I address this
question
> in an article called "The Herrenfrage" in Medieval Masculinities (ed.
Clare
> Lees).
>
> There was a multiplication of women's communities at the time but it never
> came close to matching the numbers of men's houses.
>
> Jo Ann McNamara
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