****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I was given this book as a gift. It's brilliant. I would never have thought that a book about how we have dealt with women's pregnancy, giving birth and welcoming infant children into the world could be so fascinating and amusing. The book is easy to read. Frankly, I couldn't wait for the next mad nugget: strange contraptions, folk beliefs, how the kings and queens and the poor dealt with it. How you can you not like the term "piss prophets" for the doctors who detected pregnancy with early urine tests, or myths that babies were believed to come from birds' eggs, ponds, or under cabbages or the gooseberry bush. Another fun fact: women required 'purification' by 'lying-in' in isolation after they gave birth, as they were considered impure by the church. Those who had a boy child required 33 days lying-in, whereas after a girl child the mother required twice the time! Poor women needed to get back to work as soon as possible with all sort of subterfuges taken to avoid the eyes of the church.The author covers a period in Europe (some in America) from 13th to 19th centuries. The pictures and photos on all but a few of the 150 pages are excellent quality reproductions from major museum collections: birthing furniture, medical implements, cartoons of the era, prints and paintings that were like documentary photos of the time: midwives, doctors, women, infants, panicking fathers, and the large entourages or audiences present at some births to validate a rightful heir to the throne.The author is a very good social historian who writes well and to the point, with compassion, wit and thoroughness. I see she has been the head to the National Archives in the UK and at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London.If you are interested in artifacts or social history, as a scholar or a general reader, or know new parents, this would be a great gift book. As I said, I just read it right through because it was so unbelievable and touching at times about who we are as human beings when it comes to the basic "facts of life." A surprise to me! Hence the 5 star review!
