Ask Me About My Uterus by Abby Norman

Author:Abby Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

IRVINE LOUDON, WHO PUBLISHED A paper on maternal mortality throughout the eighteenth century in 1986, referred to his research as the study of “a deep, dark and continuous stream of mortality.” Women who died in childbirth either had complications during delivery, such as hemorrhaging, or complications after, such as puerperal fever. The latter was called “childbed fever,” because women who had just delivered babies in “lying-in hospitals” seemed particularly vulnerable to it. The disease was actually sepsis, a potentially life-threatening infection of the blood, and it was caused by the very doctors who treated the women in hospital.

At that point in history, doctors were kind of jacks-of-all-trades: they delivered babies, treated the sick and injured, and conducted autopsies when necessary. The problem was, they weren’t washing their hands in between. So, a doctor might be conducting an autopsy and be called away to help deliver a baby. This was before germ theory, so it never occurred to a doctor to wash up beforehand. Essentially, doctors were transmitting any and all of the diseases or infections they encountered in their previous patients (living or dead) to new mothers and their babies.

When women began dying from sepsis in London hospitals at a faster clip than women who delivered at home with midwives, a few pioneering physicians began to investigate (including Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, known best for his poetry, but who was also an accomplished physician). Once medical science discovered and began to actively crusade against transmissible infection, childbed fever all but evaporated. But there were still risks to childbirth, many of which were silent and pernicious.

Eclampsia, a dangerous rise in blood pressure, can cause fatal seizures after a baby is born and may come on quite suddenly. The youngest daughter of the Crawley family on the beloved period drama Downton Abbey died of this when the two male doctors who were charged with treating her couldn’t agree on her course of treatment: a storyline that, unfortunately, is based on fact.

Of course, for the vast majority of human history, women gave birth virtually anywhere but in a hospital: at home, at work in the fields, in a hut or a cave—and certainly these places weren’t the most sterile and safe environments. Yet humankind persisted.

Just as childbirth can endanger a woman’s life, so, too, can menstruation. Women today have nearly four times as many periods in their lifetimes as their ancestors did—around 450 to 500. It might seem like an extremely high number, but consider the following: if a woman begins to menstruate at age twelve and ceases to menstruate at age fifty (averages that are hypothetically perfect but nonexistent in practice on both ends), and she has one period per month during that time, she’ll have had 456 periods in her lifetime. Factor in one pregnancy, where her periods would be absent for at least 9 months, or maybe a year if she breastfeeds on demand, and she’d only be down 12 to 15 periods. So even two or three pregnancies would only save her maybe 50 periods in her lifetime.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.