How did ancient women deliver baby?
- Thread starter Saint
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How did ancient women deliver baby?
Self or from experienced women who either had had a child or had given previous assistance - to humans or farm animals
Women 10000 years ago, did they know how to cut the umbilical cord?
Seriously?
How ancient people know that having sex can have baby?
I'm sure many made the connection, probably from farm animal observations
Did they know how to copulate?
Again seriously?
Are those serious questions?
Dogs "know how to copulate." Baboons can give birth without a hospital. And you don't have to cut the umbilical cord - it shrivels up and falls off on its own.
No. The human race became extinct.
Women overwhelmingly served as classical antiquity's version of gynecologists, obstetricians, and nurses/midwives. When location made it possible (in contrast to handed down lore of remote communities), many did receive what amounted to formal training for that era. Historical information about such matters, however, was mediated to the future by males. For instance, this apparently paraphrased from Donald Todman's Childbirth in ancient Rome: from tradition folklore to obstetrics:
Soranus described three main stages of pregnancy: conception, which regarded keeping the male seed within the womb; pica, which occurred 40 days into pregnancy and included symptoms of nausea and cravings for extraordinary foods. During this phase women were also instructed to exercise and sleep more to build up strength as preparation for the labor process. The final stage of pregnancy was described as the labor and the process of delivery. In preparation for labor, the woman was advised to bathe in wine and sweet-water baths to calm her mind before delivery. Her belly was then rubbed with oils to decrease the appearance of stretch marks, and her genitals were anointed with herbs and injected with softeners such as goose fat.
Pregnancy testing via urinating on grain seeds dates back at least to Ancient Egypt (supposedly 70% accuracy according to a 1963 study, but take that with a grain of salt).
The term "delivering" circa two or three centuries ago originally meant delivering slash rescuing a woman from death during and after childbirth, rather than "delivering babies". It's estimated that 1 in 34 women died in childbirth during ancient times. But that probably pertains to regions categorized as contributing to the history of the Western World.
Indigenous peoples of recent centuries certainly aren't ancient, but they could still reflect low-tech practices. In the 17th century, Adrien Van der Donck described Native American childbirth as involving the expecting mother departing "...alone to a secluded place near a brook, or stream of water . . . and prepare a shelter for themselves with mats and coverings, where, provided with provisions necessary for them, they await their delivery without the company or aid of any person. . . . They rarely are sick from child-birth [and] suffer no inconveniences from the same.” Other descriptions from European witnesses are supposedly similar. But these accounts are sometimes disparaged today with respect to their being interpreted by men often witnessing such events for the first time. Rather than, say, a vastly more experienced midwife or the rare husband actually desiring/demanding to be allowed in to observe his wife giving birth first hand, back home.
Midwifery dates back as far as history can go. So there is your replacement for hospital facilities, wherever the event commenced (usually home) is where the midwife intervened. During the Renaissance and later, when "experts" who believed in bloodletting and who practiced in unsanitary conditions began partially crowding out midwives, postpartum infections became a scourge. In 15th-century Florence, "childbirth was so dangerous that a woman would make out her will as soon as she found out she was pregnant".
Circumstances didn't necessarily improve even after the Enlightenment, right up to the edge of the 20th-century.
Druin Burch (When Childbirth Was Natural, and Deadly): In the first half of the nineteenth century about five European women in a thousand died from childbirth. Death rates in maternity hospitals were often ten times that; the hospitals stayed open because doctors had an incurable faith in good intentions, and patients a poor grasp of mortality statistics. The physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes led the American campaign to stop the spread of the disease by getting doctors to wash their hands. Obstetricians felt slighted. "Doctors are gentlemen," said Charles Meigs of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, arguing that no such care was needed, "and gentlemen's hands are clean." How could the pure of heart possibly be spreading disease? For Meigs and many others, noble intentions mentally equated to good outcomes. It would be hard to find another example of the sympathetic fallacy with such far-reaching and tragic consequences. Yet hand washing slowly grew commoner. Aided by Louis Pasteur's advocacy of germ theory, hygiene improved. Giving birth began to get safer.
Bells
Staff member
Pushing.
Teeth, sharp rock, or they let it fall off like other animals do...
Same way as many young people today..
Experience. When 1 + 1 can sometimes result in a 3!
Well, given they were having babies, then the answer is yes.
Frankly, the only take away from this thread at present is the realisation that the education system really did fail you terribly.
Because things can go wrong very quickly during delivery and safest place to be - hospital with medical assistance on tap
They don't, in the sense birth will happen when it happens no matter where the mother to be is
You don't need a hospital if everything goes well
In the time I worked as Midwife saw many moments which if occurred outside of hospital bye bye mother and baby
Don't miss those moments, do miss the nice moments
foghorn
Valued Senior Member
It took eons for them to work out the connection between accidentally falling on top of each other and producing children.
Via the birth canal.
Janus58
Valued Senior Member
Modern Women don't need hospitals to deliver babies. While ancient women had babies without them, the percentage of infants or even the mothers, dying during childbirth was much higher then. Giving birth in a hospital reduces these occurrences.
You don't even have to go back to "ancient" times. Improvements in medicine over just the last 60 or so years has made a difference. Case in point: Before I was born, my mom, suffered a series of miscarried pregnancies ( 9 to be exact). In two of those cases, she gave birth prematurely, and both of the babies lived just a few hours ( long enough to be issued birth and death certificates). This was back in the 1950's. Today, those same premature babies very likely would have been saved.
Another example: Cows.
Cows are perfectly capable of giving birth naturally, on their own. But, they can also have problems with delivery. I remember a number of instances from when I grew up on a farm where Dad had to assist a cow in giving birth. (And one time where we needed to call a neighbor for another pair of hands.)
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Not here.
I doubt it took anywhere near that amount of time to figure it out. In fact, I would bet that such knowledge was innately known, given that we evolved from mammalian common ancestors that were similar to us and pro-created the same way.
foghorn
Valued Senior Member
And, you took me seriously??
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Poe's Law.
