When Prudishness Is Costly
Earlier this week on NPR’s Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed Randi Epstein about her book Get Me Out, chronicling the history of childbirth. Gross and Epstein discuss some of the reasons why so many women died before modern medicine.
This interview touches on many different issues, but what I found most disturbing was the willingness of men and the women themselves to jeopardize their health and their babies’ health due to something as trivial as having to be seen naked by another man.
There were other forceps starting to be invented but when women started to think, gosh, I’ll get a man in the room because he seems so professional, or for one reason or another, her husband thought it was more professional to have a medically-trained person in the room, we still could not fathom that this male doctor would see you naked. So what they would do is cover the woman with a sheet and basically it was set up so it looked like she had a tent over her. So the doctor really couldnt see what he was doing. And I think the scariest was those with a forcep in their hands and they would put their hands under the sheet and deliver the baby without seeing anything.
You can find the full transcript of the interview here.
Tags: Childbirth, Fresh Air, NPR
February 5th, 2010 at 10:42 pm
Thanks for this fascinating piece, Mila. Of course, what we think of as trivial today was often momentous at other moments–which is one of the great reasons to gain historical consciousness!
I enjoyed reading the excerpt and it reminded me of something I read a number of years ago that said that some women in antiquity used dried crocodile dung as a contraceptive. I don’t know how well it worked but people are certainly imaginative!
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:44 am
[…] yesterday’s discussion I thought about my first entry on this blog, the Fresh Air podcast about childbirth, and how Professor Quinby had commented about […]