'Because of poverty brought into hospital: ...' A casenote-based analysis of the changing role of the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 1850-1912

The reckoning table, the periodoscope and the shaping of modern pregnancy in nineteenth-century print forms

How did Victorian print forms shape experiences of pregnancy? This article focuses on pregnancy calendars, a form that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Such calendars appeared in tabular as well as circular formats and were printed in books, periodicals and pocketbooks designed for both medical practitioners and fertile women. These calendars shaped the nebulous period of human gestation, giving pregnancy narrative form by dividing it temporally into stages and highlighting key events and medical interventions. In the nineteenth century, these printed pregnancy calendars mediated between women's personal experiences and gestational body time as well as medical management of that time. During this period, such calendars-which included the columnar reckoning table as well as the circular periodoscope-functioned as instruments of both medical control and female agency. Although they did not enable pregnant women to critique the medicalisation of pregnancy, they nevertheless accorded to such women some power in managing their reproductive bodies.

Birth weight and adult health in historical perspective: evidence from a New Zealand cohort, 1907-1922

We provide new historical evidence on the developmental origins of health and disease in a cohort of boys born between 1907 and 1922 in Wellington, New Zealand. Using a dataset of 1523 birth records that include birth weight and length we find 852 (58%) of the adult cohort in World War II records measuring stature, body mass and blood pressure. On average, the boys weighed 3.5 kg at birth, similar to Australian and American babies of the era, and nearly identical to full-term New Zealand babies in the 1990s. Using OLS regression models we estimate the effect of birth weight on adult stature and systolic blood pressure. We find an increase in birth weight of 1 kg is associated with an increase in stature of 2.6 cm (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.6 cm-3.6 cm), and a decrease in systolic blood pressure of 2.1 mm/Hg (95% CI - 5.00 to 0.67). This is the earliest cohort by fifty years for whom the fetal origins hypothesis has been examined in early adulthood. Our estimates of the effect of birth weight on blood pressure are towards the upper end of the range of published estimates in modern cohorts.

Birth Attendants and Midwifery Practice in Early Twentieth-century Derbyshire

The 1902 Midwives Act introduced training and supervision for midwives in England and Wales, outlawing uncertified-and-untrained midwives (handywomen) and phasing out certified-but-untrained (bona fide) midwives. This paper compares the numbers and practices of these two different types of birth attendant with each other, with qualified and certified midwives and with doctors in early twentieth-century Derbyshire during this period of change, and examines the spatial and social factors influencing women's choice of birth attendant. It finds that the new legislation did not entirely eliminate continuity in traditional practices and allegiance, and that both social and spatial factors governed the choice of delivery attendant, with fewer midwives available in rural areas and a surviving network of untrained bona fide midwives in mining communities. Within this spatial pattern, however, although wealthier women were more likely to have chosen a doctor or a qualified midwife, familiarity and loyalty allowed bona fide midwives to maintain their case loads.

Releasing mother's burdens: child abandonment and retrieval in Madrid, 1890-1935

In nineteenth-century Europe, the foundling hospital grew beyond its traditional purpose of mitigating the shame of unwed mothers by also permitting widows, widowers, and poor married couples to abandon their children there temporarily. In the Foundling Hospital of Madrid (FHM), this new short-term abandonment could be completely anonymous due to the implementation of a wheel—a device on the outside wall of the institution that could be turned to place a child inside—which remained open until 1929. The use of survival-analysis techniques to disentangle the determinants of retrieval in a discrete framework reveals important differences in the situations of the women who abandoned their children at the FHM, partly depending on whether they accessed it through the Maternity Hospital after giving birth or they accessed it directly. The evidence suggests that those who abandoned their children through the Maternity Hospital retrieved them only when they had attained a certain degree of economic stability, whereas those who abandoned otherwise did so just as soon as the immediate condition prompting the abandonment had improved.

Maternity Charities, the Edinburgh Maternity Scheme and the Medicalisation of Childbirth, 1900–1925

Increased medical involvement in maternal welfare has been linked with the introduction of local authority administered schemes associated with government concern for women's health that reached a peak during the First World War. Although local studies have noted the work of philanthropic groups, the implication has been that their contribution to the medicalisation of childbirth was small. This article uses analysis of the personal health records of users of Edinburgh's maternity charities to argue that the process of medicalisation was begun by these charities, and preceded the introduction of the Edinburgh Maternity and Child Welfare Scheme in 1917. However, whilst it is argued that initially the Scheme had limited impact, the article concludes that its funding and stability offered the opportunity for more dynamic management of abnormal pregnancies. Thus this encouraged a gradual shift in attitude to birth from an essentially physiological event to a potentially pathological incident.