Oh, how difficult it was for poor women in the Middle Ages. Medicine as such practically did not exist, let alone obstetrics. Women with fear waited for the hour of childbirth, because at the most difficult moment they were almost alone with their problem.
In those days, the church had a very strong influence on people. Not so much legal laws as the word of the priest regulated relations in society. To everything that was associated with sex life, the attitude was ambiguous. On the one hand, sex was considered a sin, on the other, it was necessary to give birth to children, preferably more.
However, after giving birth, a woman was considered unclean, she was not even allowed into church. Pregnancy did not give any indulgences and privileges: it’s not a disease, you just carry a child, a march to work. Childbirth in the field? Yes, good. In the barn? Also a good place. It will be lucky if you will give birth in a bath, where it is at least warm and clean.
If we add to this the very low level of hygiene, medicine in general, and obstetric science in particular, it is not surprising that women in childbirth often died. But then there was no contraception. Sometimes they gave birth every year, if they were lucky enough to survive in previous births.
At that time, medical universities had already begun to appear. But doctors were mostly men, obstetrics among them was considered the most unenviable and shameful occupation. Women, on the other hand, did not have access to education, with rare exceptions.
Midwives came to the rescue. Usually they were mothers with many children who had no medical experience other than their own experience of childbearing. In fact, the midwives only created the appearance of help – they insisted on herbal teas, spoke water, waved amulets over the unfortunate women in labor. Only a few of the midwives had the ability, even a certain gift of seeing the situation, they could determine the state of the giving birth, the position of the fetus and really helped, made efforts to ensure that the birth was successful.
In the case of difficult childbirth, when there was a question of life and death, midwives turned to surgeons for help. But those, naturally, took a fee for their services, and not every family could afford such expenses.
Compliance with hygiene and sanitary standards was out of the question. Often women and their newborn babies died from sepsis – blood poisoning. But it is worth noting that midwives were much cleaner than doctors who often worked with corpses and simply did not wash their hands before examining a woman in labor!
Herbal decoctions were used as anesthesia. In fact, they did not alleviate the pain, they only intoxicated. If the child walked not with his head, but with his legs or ass, the woman could be thrown on stretched sheets – for some reason, the midwives thought that due to such manipulations, the fetus could shift and take the correct position.
Help is dubious, but it was impossible to give birth alone. After all, if the child is born dead, the woman will have to prove that it was not she who killed him. They carried out investigations, studied the woman’s clothes – and only after that a verdict was made whether she was guilty or not.
By the way, in royal families there could be no question of solitude at this intimate moment. The very process of childbirth was turned into a kind of performance – witnesses were called to watch closely so that the child, the future heir to the throne, was not replaced.
And in general, despite the fact that wealthy persons, and especially members of royal families, had a lot of privileges, they died in childbirth in the same way as ordinary peasant women. Unsanitary conditions flourished absolutely everywhere. Husbands of queens and princesses ordered portraits of wives on the eve of childbirth, and they, in turn, wrote wills. After all, the risk that a woman would not survive childbirth was very high. This is how doomed and longingly waited for medieval women, it would seem, a joyful and happy moment.
And the representatives of the aristocratic family did not have to bear pregnancy, but to mature. Expectant mothers were often forbidden to leave their chambers, they were forced to spend whole days lying in bed with the curtains closed. And a month before giving birth, they were evicted to separate rooms, where only her husband and maids could visit her. What kind of health can we talk about?
In the Middle Ages, the first attempts to perform a cesarean section began. In this case, the woman had no chance to survive. She was bleeding: the doctors did not understand that the uterus needed to be sutured after the incision, they naively assumed that it would grow together on its own. The first to figure out that it is still necessary to sew up, the Greek doctors. But this practice spread very slowly throughout Europe.
The situation began to improve only in the XNUMXth century thanks to Dr. Ambroise Paré, who zealously took up the advancement of obstetric science. The doctor was shocked by the death rate among women in labor – two out of a hundred women died. He organized the first maternity ward in Paris and a real obstetric school. Only women could become students of this educational institution. Despite the short course of study – only three months – the students received a considerable store of knowledge, they were not yet midwives, but no longer midwives. By the way, it was then that gynecological mirrors appeared in the arsenal of doctors.