Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

* The oldest existing medical treatise, the Ebers Papyrus of Egypt, mentionschildbirth only once, according to R. P. Finney (The Story of Motherhood [New York: Liveright, 1937], p. 23).

† One exception is that of high-caste Hindu women of the early centuries A.D., who were apparently delivered by a priest-physician even in normallabors, while lower-caste women had midwives. (See Harvey Graham, Eternal Eve [London: Hutchinson, 1960], p. 23; Finney, Ope cil., pp. 2638.)

‡ “Sometimes it worked. . . . And each time it did seem to work, those who had conceived the idea became convinced of their power to influence and control nature. That the midwife would have waited for the natural process to move at its own pace, and that her quiet assistance would have been enough to see the process through to a safe conclusion, were often forgotten in the face of such dramatic evidence that man’s power to reason could shape and control nature” (Suzanne Arms, Immaculate Deception [Boston, Houghton Miffiin, 1975], p. 10).

§ The term “midwife” has been so downgraded and so associated with ignorance and dirt, that we can easily lose sight of that fact. Kathleen Barry suggests a connection between the idea of the “filthy” midwife and the male physician’s view of women’s bodies, and the doctoring of women, as “dirty.” If woman’s flesh is intrinsically foul and evil, these qualities become attributed to those who have to do with her, particularly at a time as charged with fear and mystery for men as the moment of giving birth. (See “The Cutting Edge: A Look at Male Motivation in Obstetrics and Gynecology,” unpublished, copyright, 1972, by Kathleen Barry.) This is not simply a Western male cultural bias. “Since God, who made disease, had conveniently decreed that women were inferior, unclean and blood-producing creatures, and Chinese physicians had diagnosed pregnancy as a disease of the blood, religious tenets held that the gravid female was unclean. If menstruating or pregnant, a woman could not walk through the torii, or arches, of shrines” (M. W. Standlee, The Great Pulse: Japanese Midwifery and Obstetrics Through the Ages [Rutland, Vt.: Chas. E. Tuttle, 1959], p. 26).

¶ The mild form of ergot poisoning caused abortion in pregnant women; the severe form was a disease called “St. Anthony’s Fire” which caused the limbs of the afflicted to become blackened and gangrenous and to fall off—one of those peculiarly horrible and mysterious diseases of the Middle Ages which must have lent credence to the idea of Hell.

# In 1522, a Dr. Wortt of Hamburg had the temerity to dress in women’s clothes in order to be present at a delivery. For this indecency and degradation of his profession he was burned at the stake. Yet the majority of books on midwifery were written by men—Rösslin, Damian Carbon in Spain, Paré in France, among many others.

** One of the less covert misogynists, AugustuS K. Gardner, M.D., used to deliver an introductory lecture to his course in midwifery at the Philadelphia College of Physicians and

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.