Recently, while working as a senior house officer in a busy emergency department and only weeks away from giving birth to my first child, I came across some of my great grandfather's university lecture notes. He studied medicine at Queen's College in Belfast and later became a general practitioner in the north of England.
The notes I discovered were beautifully handwritten in black ink with neat headings and subheadings, all bound together in a black A5 notebook. In short, the type of lecture notes my peers and I could only have dreamt of. The subject was “Midwifery,” and the first session in the lecture series on pregnancy was taken on 17 October 1901. As I browsed through the pages, I mused on what antenatal care I would have received if I had been born a century earlier.
Lecture 15, for instance, informed me of the relevance of food, clothing, air, stimulants, household conditions, and exercise. The influence of diet was noted as “very real.” Prochownik of Hamburg was quoted as advising special diets in the following cases:
“In fat women whose previous labours have been difficult owing to defective muscular action, by special dieting easier confinements are procured and the patients are enabled to suckle their children.
“In cases of contracted pelvises (i.e. those with a conjugate of 31/4 to 4 inches) special dieting will so influence the size, weight and osseous development of the fetus that normal labour is obtained.”
(Why did we never hear about this Prochownik chap when we were learning about cephalopelvic disproportion in obstetrics and gynaecology?)
My desire to have lived at the turn of the 19th century culminated when I read that “the house should be perfect both in ventilation and sanitation” (I was definitely going to have to have words with my husband) and that regarding sleep “eight to ten hours are necessary. Patients should avoid late hours” (I was also going to have to speak to my consultant about this). When I discovered that “breasts should be free from all compression and should be bathed daily with the following lotion: Boracic acid 3i, Whiskey 3i, Water 3iip,” I began to wonder how many women may just have left out the boracic acid and used the potion for more pleasurable purposes.
In a later lecture, however, my great grandfather had made slightly more concerning notes on the aetiology of birthmarks. They can, he wrote, be explained by “maternal impressions . . . The impression must be a very strong one—fright etc.” This was followed by an example: “Lady driving saw child run over—over neck. She was three months pregnant. At labour child had scar across neck.” Having already worked in an inner city emergency department for several months, where trauma victims were the largest patient group, I began to wonder whether my unborn child would have any normal anatomy left. I closed the lecture notes and decided it was time to start my maternity leave.
Footnotes
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