Category: Read Along
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Sadism in the Delivery Room Pt 1 & 2 | Ladies Home Journal 1958 | Read Along
Intro In November of 1957, a Registered Nurse wrote into the Ladies Home Journal asking them, in light of their support of women’s rights, to investigate what she called “sadism in the delivery room”. The editor followed the letter with a brief note asking readers to write in with their experiences. Thousands of letters came…
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Trends in Obstetrics, 1950 | Read Along
I discovered an article, “Trends in Obstetrics” from 1950 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (or JAMA). It was authored by two doctors from the Boston Lying-In Hospital, Duncan E. Reid and Mandel E. Cohen. Some of the trends they discussed may surprise modern readers/listeners because they are still hot button issues today:…
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The Grandmother Problem
Transcript: Grandmother problems. Do you have them? For example a grandmother unable to let a new parent learn how to take care of their own baby, in their own way. or a new parent using their new role to get back at a mother they think did everything wrong by rejecting all offers of help…
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“Babies Don’t Smother” McCall’s 1952 | History of SIDS Research | Read Along
Read along to this McCall’s article by Edith Sterne about 1952’s latest research on the causes of sudden infant death, long before we had the term SIDS (coined in the 1960s). In particular, that suffocation was not the cause of sudden infant deaths and that stomach sleeping wasn’t a risk factor, a theory which had…
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Instructions for Self-Management During Pregnancy | Sir Richard Croft | Primary Source Read Along
This primary source read-along is from a chapter in Mrs Thomas Little’s Domestic Institutes of Young Mothers, specifically the third edition published in 1824. The chapter is the advice for self-care during pregnancy from Mrs Little’s friend, the late Sir Richard Croft, 6th Baronet, a royal physician and an accoucheur (man-midwife). Sir Croft attended Princess…
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Death of Mary Wollstonecraft after childbirth, by William Godwin (1798) | Primary Source Read Along
After his new wife’s premature death in 1797 following the birth of her second and their first child, Mary, William Godwin wrote Memoirs of the Author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1798. Read along with me the final chapter in which he documents the ten days following the birth until her…
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“An Address to Pregnant Females” 1810 | Read Along
Check out An Address to Pregnant Women at the Wellcome Collection
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“An Essay Upon Nursing” 1748 | Primary Source Read Along
This is a read-along of William Cadogan’s letter to the governors of the Foundling Hospital in London, published in 1748. Cadogan doesn’t approve of the way women or old-timey doctors managed infant care because their approaches aren’t natural. He proposes a feeding schedule that would result in malnutrition for any infant: four feedings in twenty-four…
The Baby Historian 