Category: Video
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Ancient Egyptian Hawk Mummy Mystery | Baby History Shorts
In 2016, as part of Maidstone Museum’s Ancient Lives project, their mummified collections, comprised mostly of animals, were CT scanned. Shockingly, EA 493 Mummified Hawk (Ptolemaic Period, 300bce) didn’t contain a hawk, it contained a human. Inside of a small cartonnage, painted with a gilt hawk face and wings, but human feet in sandals, and…
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Fairy Changelings | Shorts Video
Sources: Shakespeare. William. 1709. “The First Part of Henry IV” in The Works of William Shakespear; adorn’d with cuts in six volumes. (volume three). Archive.org Wilde, William Robert. (1852) 1973. Irish Popular Superstitions. Towata, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Archive.org Yeats, William Butler. 1888. Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry. London: Walter Scott. Archive.org…
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Ancient Breastfeeding Advice | Baby History Shorts
Before Galen there was Soranus of Ephesus, a second century physician, who influenced western medicine throughout the next two millennia. He worked within a humoral framework: during pregnancy, menstrual blood is transformed into breastmilk in the breasts and transmitted back to the fetus until birth, when lactation begins. Awful Advice In Gynecologie he advised: That a…
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Maiolica: Renaissance Childbirth Dining Sets
Sources: Met Museum. [They had a large exhibition of maiolica and not just those for use after childbirth.] Open Science Museum. Two ceramic plates with childbirth designs. JSTOR/ARTSTOR. [there are many examples of these dish sets not listed as maiolica in collections all over the world] Philadelphia Museum of Art. Piccolplasso, Cipriano. 1557. Li Tre…
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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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Neanderthal Breastfeeding | Baby History Shorts
In 2013, a paper looked at the barium deposits in the development of teeth in human children and captive macaques for which feeding history was known. Barium is limited during gestation by the placenta, but immediately after birth, barium deposits shoot up with breastfeeding. Researchers could tell when the human babies were supplemented with, or…
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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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10,000 Year Old Baby Carrier | Baby History Shorts
One of the complications of studying infant care in history, let alone prehistory (before writing), is that organic materials do not survive, that includes the clothing and carriers, as well as the bodies of infants themselves. The lack of remains has many causes: fewer births in preagricultural societies, infants grow into adults, and the remains…
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