Bridgeport Women Answer the Call

By Shirley T. Wajda, PhD

On April 15, 1861, the women of Bridgeport created the nation’s first soldiers’ aid society. News of the April 12 attack on Fort Sumter had quickly reached the citizens of Connecticut, and just as quickly, Connecticut’s women mobilized for war.

The Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society in Bridgeport initially supported the Sixth Connecticut Regiment, but the needs of the war effort were many and constant throughout the war. The society met every week and its members, needing money to purchase cloth and other necessities, went from door to door to “try to wake up every one to a sense of sacred duty that devolved upon us all.” Newspapers reported the war and the government called men to the war, but these women took it upon themselves to become active participants in the war effort.

Clothing and bedding went to the soldiers, while soldiers’ families received cloth, clothing, and bedding, food and fuel. In the first year the society provided hospitals with 5,928 articles of clothing and bedding, 212 pairs of slippers, 80 dressing gowns, 108 bottles of brandy and wine (considered medicinal), 132 pounds of tea, sugar, and crackers, 69 pounds of soap and candles; 56 bottles of camphor, laudanum, and other drugs; 225 pounds of dried fruits, 110 quarts of jellies, and 2,086 “miscellaneous articles.” In later years the society arranged for free railroad transport of fresh vegetables and other provisions — some 1,500 barrels and boxes —to many Connecticut regiments along the Atlantic Coast.

The Bridgeport women did not cease their efforts when the war ended. The society, then 150 strong, renamed itself the Ladies’ Soldiers’ Monument Association, raising $10,000 toward the city’s Civil War monument. Dedicated in 1876, Bridgeport’s Soldiers Monument stands in Seaside Park, a testimony to the service of the city’s men and the devotion of the city’s women.

Shirley T. Wajda, PhD, currently an independent historian living in the Connecticut Western Reserve, is the creator and organizer of Viennapedia, a wiki devoted to the history and culture of her hometown, Vienna, Trumbull County, Ohio.

Image: The Influence of Woman, Harper's Weekly, 1862

From: connecticuthistory.org

Read More

Hygiene in the Civil War

by Melissa King, Demand Media

During the Civil War, soldiers' lack of basic hygiene may have been deadlier than bullets or bayonets. For each soldier who died on the battlefield, two more died of disease. Filthy living conditions, along with lack of knowledge about germs and bacteria, caused thousands of soldiers to get sick and die. Many doctors were just as unhygienic as their patients.

Lack of Medical Training
When the Civil War began, American doctors were woefully unprepared. On average, they received about two years of medical training before they began treating patients. Doctors in this time period had little understanding of basic hygiene, sanitation practices, germs or bacteria. In addition, there were too few trained doctors to go around. Doctors on the battlefield often had a shortage of supplies, too. Due to this lack of knowledge and understaffed hospitals, thousands of soldiers died in the war that might have lived with proper care.

Living in Filth
Civil War camps were often just as dangerous as the battlefield. Soldiers allowed garbage to pile up in the camps. They also dug latrines too close to drinking streams. The waste from the latrines seeped into the water supply, causing many to get sick. Soldiers were cramped closely together, which allowed sickness and disease to spread quickly. They bathed infrequently and were usually dirty. Insects, such as lice, mosquitoes, fleas, maggots and flies plagued the soldiers day and night. Soldiers would sanitize lice-infested clothing in a pot filled with boiling water. They would then cook food in the same pot.

Diseases
Civil War soldiers experienced a number of debilitating diseases. Of all diseases, dysentery was the biggest killer. It caused severe and bloody diarrhea. Typhoid fever, also called "Camp Fever," was the second-worst killer. It caused one-quarter of all disease deaths. Body lice transmitted the disease via bacteria. Victims had delirium, high fever, rash and an intense headache. Smallpox, a highly contagious disease, was also a big killer. Soldiers living in close proximity easily spread smallpox to one another. Tuberculosis, a deadly lung disease caused by bacteria, was also common. Mosquitoes spread diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.

Medical Treatment
During the Civil War, doctors treated patients with "cures" and operations that would seem deplorable today. For example, a doctor might collect pus from a victim's wound, then transfer it to another soldier's open wound. The doctor believed that pus was a good thing and that it would help the wound heal faster. Doctors used a mixture of chalk and mercury to treat closed bowels. They commonly used whiskey as an antiseptic and pain reliever. In many cases, a soldier's wounds were so severe that doctors had to amputate an arm or leg. They often operated with dirty tools and worked while dressed in a bloody apron. After an amputation, a soldier still might die from infection, blood poisoning or gangrene.

About the Author
Melissa King began writing in 2001. She spent three years writing for her local newspaper, "The Colt," writing editorials, news stories, product reviews and entertainment pieces. She is also the owner and operator of Howbert Freelance Writing. King holds an Associate of Arts in communications from Tarrant County College.

From: classroom.synonym.com

Image: Running parallel and next to the stream that provided drinking water were the long sinks or latrines, as shown in this 1864 photograph by A.J. Riddle

Learn more about the sanitary (or unsanitary) practices of the Civil War era at www.CivilWarRx.com

Read More

'Nurse, Spy, Cook:' How Harriet Tubman Found Freedom Through Food

By Nina Martyris, 4-27-16

Harriet Tubman, who will soon be the first African-American to grace a U.S. currency note, spent her whole adult life raising money either to rescue slaves or help them start life afresh on free soil. While her abolitionist friends in the North were generous contributors to the cause, Tubman also self-funded her heroic raids through an activity she enjoyed and excelled at: cooking.

Tubman's role as a professional cook, which provided her with a much-needed source of money in her long and poverty-stricken life, has often been overlooked.

Tubman was the daughter of a cook. Her mother, Rit Ross, worked in the "big house" on the plantation in Dorchester County, Md., where Tubman was raised. An early food-related incident is testimony to the future General Tubman's strong-willed character. When she was about 6, Tubman was hired out to a neighboring farm – a common practice at the time – run by James and Susan Cook. When she got there, writes biographer Kate Clifford Larson in Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, the hungry little girl was so nervous in the company of a white family, she refused the milk offered by her new mistress.

"I was fond of milk as any young shoot," Tubman later said to her first biographer, Sarah Bradford. "But all the time I was there I stuck to it, that I didn't drink sweet milk."

She spent almost two unhappy years with the family, during which she was regularly flogged and finally sent home after she fell seriously ill.

In 1849, fearing she would be sold like her two older sisters had been, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. She travelled to Baltimore and New Jersey, where in order to support herself and raise money to go back to rescue her family, she spent the summer of 1852 working as a cook in a resort at fashionable Cape May, N.J. She used her wages to pay for a raid that freed nine slaves.

On the roughly 13 raids Tubman conducted "down into Egypt" over the course of a decade, one of the many challenges she faced was keeping her party of rescued slaves fed on their long and arduous journey – often through snow, icy rain and swamps, with teams of armed men and dogs searching for the runaways. To keep babies from crying and attracting attention, she dosed their bread with laudanum to put them to sleep.

On the Underground Railroad, "one of the conductor's chief duties was finding nourishment – those slaves who didn't have the benefit of a conductor were on their own. One slave recalled wandering through the woods all day eating acorns."
Kate Clifford Larson, Tubman biographer

She may have been hailed as the Black Moses, but unlike that ancient prophet, she couldn't wave her staff and produce manna from heaven. Instead, she simply used her ingenuity. Once, after buying two chickens at a market, she almost came face to face with a former overseer. So she quickly released one of the chickens she was carrying, and pretended to give chase, creating a comic kerfuffle that allowed her to slip away unnoticed, even though, ironically, everyone's eyes were on her.

Otherwise, Tubman went foraging in the forest. "While the woods were rich with resources like sassafras, black cherry, and paw-paw, not everything was safe to eat," Clifford Larson told me. "One of the conductor's chief duties was finding nourishment – those slaves who didn't have the benefit of a conductor were on their own. One slave recalled wandering through the woods all day eating acorns."

What made foraging doubly difficult was that many slaves fled in the winter, shortly after Christmas. "They knew they would probably be sold off at the end of the year, so this was when they would have to run," says Robyn Affron of Adkins Arboretum, who worked on an audio tour of the Underground Railroad with Clifford Larson. "In winter in the mid-Atlantic, they had little or no food. If they were lucky they could seek refuge and food from the Quaker community. Sacks would be hidden in holes in trees with warm socks and hardtack biscuits."

But no matter how dire the situation, Tubman, who was deeply religious, operated on the unshakable belief that God would provide. An abstemious eater, she fasted on Fridays, a practice she learned from her father Ben Ross. He also taught her some invaluable survival skills.

"An expert lumberjack, Ross spent much time living off the land, navigating through forests, fields and waterways," says Clifford Larson. "He passed that knowledge to his gifted daughter, and she put it to good use while traveling along the Underground Railroad."

Tubman grew up on a farm, and through her life, she reached for earthy food metaphors to express herself. "I felt like a blackberry in a pail of milk," she said when she, an illiterate black woman, bid for and bought a parcel of land in Auburn, N.Y., that would eventually house the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Infirm Negroes.

"I threw him acrossed my shoulder like a bag o' meal and took him away out of there," was how she described her audacious 1860 rescue of a fugitive slave named Charles Nalle in Troy, N.Y., in the midst of a whirl of police batons and bullets.

And in response to a group called the African Civilization Society, whose mission it was to repatriate all Negroes – free and slave alike – to Africa, Tubman related the parable of a farmer who sowed onions and garlic on his land, but when he found his cow's butter too strong and unsellable, returned to planting clover. By then it was too late – the wind had blown the onions and garlic all over the field. White people, she said, had got slaves to do their hard work for them, but now that their presence didn't suit them, they wanted to pack them off to Africa. "But they can't do it," she said in a public speech in Boston that drew loud applause. "We're rooted here, and they can't pull us up."

During the Civil War, Tubman worked as a nurse and a spy, but supplemented her income by running an eating-house in Beaufort. There, she sold Union soldiers root beer, pie and ginger bread, which she baked during the night, after her day's work. When she put in a claim for a Civil War pension, her role was described as "nurse, spy and cook."

Tubman's earliest childhood memory had to do with food. She recalled how, when she had to babysit her younger brother – she was barely 4 or 5 years old herself – she used to "cut a fat chunk of pork and toast it on the coals and put it in his mouth. One night he went to sleep with that hanging out, and when my mother come home she thought I'd done kill him. I nursed that there baby till he was so big I couldn't tote him any mo'."

Indeed, the dramatic arc of Tubman's life story, from slave to national hero, can be captured in her tragicomic relationship to pigs. Caught stealing a lump of sugar at the Cooks' house, she saw the mistress reach for the whip, and fled to a neighboring farm. For the next five days, she hid in a pigpen and fought with "an ole sow, an' perhaps eight or ten little pigs" for the potato peelings and other pigswill. Finally, starved and afraid of the belligerent mother pig, she went back. James Cook whipped her.

Over three decades later, when Tubman made history by leading three Union gunboats in the famous 1863 Combahee River Raid that freed 700 slaves in South Carolina, she described how the throngs of slave women came streaming towards "Lincoln's gun-boats" with their babies, baskets, chickens and pigs.

"I nebber see such a sight," she is quoted saying in Bradford's 1869 biography. "We laughed, an' laughed, an' laughed. Here you'd see a woman wid a pail on her head, rice a smokin' in it jus' as she'd taken it from de fire, young one hangin' on behind, one han' roun' her forehead to hold on, 'tother han' diggin' into de rice-pot, eatin' wid all its might; hold of her dress two or three more; down her back a bag wid a pig in it."

One woman brought along two pigs, one white, one black. All three were taken on board, and the pigs promptly christened after a Confederate Civil War general and the president of the Confederate States of America: "de white pig Beauregard, and de black pig Jeff Davis."

Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Image: Harriet Tubman, pictured between 1860 and 1875. The woman who will soon become the first African-American to grace an American currency note self-funded many of her heroic raids to save slaves by cooking.

From: npr.org

Learn more about the heroic women of the Civil War at www.CivilWarRx.com

Read More

History of Maggot Debridement Therapy

From: rnceus.com

It's not clear at what point in history people observed that there were positive results from myiasis - maggot infection. One of the first European medical reference to maggots appears in 1491 in the Hortus Sanitatus, a German medical text. In the 1500's, Ambroise Pare, a butcher-surgeon, noted that maggots helped the healing of war wounds.

There are indications that in the mid-1800's, during the Civil War, maggots were purposely introduced to wounds when physicians noted that wounds that maggots infested tended to heal better and more quickly. Zacharias, a Confederate medical officer in the Civil War, reported that he used the larvae of the green blow fly to prevent gangrene in wounded soldiers.

The modern era of maggot debridement therapy was ushered in by William Baer (1872-1931), Clinical Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Maryland. During World War I, he had observed soldiers whose wounds were infested with maggots, but clean and healing. After he returned from the war, he used maggots to treat 4 children with intractable osteomyelitis with good success. He continued to use maggot debridement therapy, but some patients developed tetanus, and so he undertook to find a method to sterilize maggots. After trial and error, he found a way to sterilize the eggs.

During the 1930's and 1940's and into the 1950's, maggot debridement therapy gained in acceptance and was used fairly routinely. Maggots were used extensively during World War II. Lederle Laboratories produced and distributed huge numbers of maggots, however, with the discovery of sulfa, penicillin, and other antibiotics to treat infection, maggots fell out of favor and Lederle stopped producing them. Realistically, given the choice of worm-like maggots crawling about in a wound or receiving injections or pills, very few people would opt for maggots.

The one person who is responsible for the resurrection of the humble maggot as a medical treatment is Dr. Ronald A. Sherman, of the University of California, Irvine. Sherman, who had a background in entomology, became interested in maggot therapy in 1983 and began clinical trials in 1989, using maggots in treatment. Sherman, and associates from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, pioneered the reintroduction of maggots and found that maggot therapy was very successful for the treatment of various types of wounds. They began to promote maggot debridement therapy. In 1990, Sherman completed a study of the use of maggots on non-healing wounds. He found that the maggots completely debrided most necrotic wounds within a week, with better rates of healing than the conventional treatment.

During the mid 1990's, interest spread to the United Kingdom, Europe and Israel, where today maggot debridement therapy is more common than it is in the United States. In the United Kingdom alone, maggot debridement therapy has been estimated as saving the equivalent of $1 billion dollars annually in health care costs. Maggot debridement therapy has been reintroduced to Australia and increasingly Australian physicians are requesting maggots for therapy.

In 1995, Sherman, currently director of the non-profit organization Bio-Therapeutics, Education and Research Foundation, took his colony of flies to the University of Irvine, CA, establishing the UC Irvine Maggot Therapy Laboratory, making maggots available to physicians throughout North America. Initially, the maggots were used without FDA approval, a legal practice, but insurance companies often will not pay for unapproved treatments. In January 2004, maggots became the first live animals to win U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval as a medical device to clean out wounds. The Maggot Therapy Laboratory is now marketing and selling maggots with the brand name Medical Maggots. Especially now, with the advent of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, maggot therapy is looking more and more promising.

Read More

The Evolution of Cancer Treatment

From: cjonline.com, 10-23-10

Mammography is most likely the most important technological advancement in the area of breast cancer detection.

Treatment for breast cancer no longer involves cauterization with hot instruments or surgeries without anesthesia. While surgery is still an option, modern-day treatments for breast cancer also include the use of radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, biological therapy or a combination of them.

Here's a look at the evolution of breast cancer treatment.

— 1600 B.C.: The Edwin Smith Papyrus describes eight cases of tumors or ulcers of the breast that were treated by cauterization, using a hot tool called the fire drill.

— 460-370 B.C.: Greek physician Hippocrates used the terms "carcinos" and "carcinoma" to describe non-ulcer-forming and ulcer-forming tumors. The words refer to a crab and mostly likely described the spreading nature of the disease.

— 1713: Italian doctor Bernardino Ramazzini reported a relatively high incidence of breast cancer and absence of cervical cancer in nuns. The observation was instrumental in the later identification and understanding of hormones and cancer risk.

— 1761: Italian Giovanni Morgagni did autopsies to relate the patient's illness to pathological findings after death. This laid the foundation for scientific oncology, or the study of cancer.

— Mid-1760s: Scottish surgeon John Hunter suggested some cancers might be cured by surgery if the tumor hadn't invaded nearby tissue and was movable. At that time, surgeries were done without anesthesia. Hunter believed cancer spread through the lymphatic system.

— 1840: German surgeon Karl Thiersch showed that cancer metastasizes through the spread of malignant cells, not through fluid.

— 1846: Anesthesia was discovered, and surgeries to remove cancer increased.

— 1860s: Prussian-born Rudolf Virchow provided the scientific basis for the modern pathological study of cancer. Body tissues removed by a surgeon now could be examined, a precise diagnosis made and a determination made whether the surgery had removed all of the cancer. He determined that all cells, including cancer cells, were derived from other cells, not lymph.

— 1882-90s: William Halsted, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, developed the radical mastectomy, which called for the removal of the breast, lymph nodes and the muscle connecting the breast to the chest wall. He believed local removal of the cancer would cure it. If cancer appeared elsewhere, it was considered a new process. Radical mastectomy was used until the 1970s, when clinical trials demonstrated less extensive surgery was equally effective for most women with breast cancer.

— 1889: English surgeon Stephen Paget concluded cancer cells spread by way of the bloodstream to all organs but were only able to grow in a few organs. This idea eventually led to the development of systemic treatments that could be used before or after surgery to destroy cells.

— Late 1895-96: Scottish surgeon Thomas Beatson discovered that removal of the ovaries often resulted in improvement of breast cancer and believed the ovaries could be a cause of breast cancer. His work provided the foundation for the use of hormone therapy to treat and prevent breast cancer.

— Early 1900s: The use of radiation therapy to treat cancer, administered in daily doses over several weeks, increases.

— Mid-1940s: The U.S. Army found that nitrogen mustard, which is related to mustard gas, worked against cancer in the lymph nodes. The discovery led to other agents that killed rapidly growing cancer cells by damaging their DNA.

— 1956: Metastatic cancer is first cured by methotrexate, a cancer treatment drug still used today.

— 1962: Tamoxifen is discovered. Some breast cancer cells require estrogen to grow. The drug prevents estrogen from binding to the estrogen receptor in breast tissue.

— 1960-90s: Mammography methods were developed. Partial mastectomies, called lumpectomies, replaced radical mastectomies and allowed less normal tissue to be removed during breast cancer surgery. Exploratory operations were replaced by ultrasound, computed tomography (CT scans), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI scans) and positron emission tomography (PET scans). Advances in radiation therapy allowed beams to better target the disease or large doses of radiation be directed to a small tumor. Adjuvant therapy was first tested in breast cancer and indicated chemotherapy after surgery could destroy remaining cancer cells. Combinations of chemotherapy drugs were used to treat cancer.

— 1994-95: BRCA 1 and BRCA 2, the gene mutations that cause breast cancer, were discovered. Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody that blocks the growth of cancer, was approved.

— 2008: Avastin, an angiogenesis inhibitor, was approved to treat metastatic breast cancer. The drug stops tumors from making new blood vessels, which the tumors need to continue growing.

Sources: American Cancer Society; "Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History," by James S. Olson

Read More

The American Civil War Experience: Lice, Disease and Quinine

By Rene Tyree, 1-17-10

The statistics of those who died during the Civil War, not from injury but from disease, are shocking. Of the 360,222 men known to have died on the Union side, a quarter of a million were lost due to disease rather than the enemy. While the Confederates didn’t keep records, it is estimated that seventy-five percent of the 258,000 Southern deaths could be attributed to disease.
For many, the cycle of illness started soon after joining up. Those from the less populated countryside found themselves in large groups after mustering in – perhaps for the first time in their lives – and were exposed to childhood maladies like the measles, mumps and smallpox.

Confederate soldier William A. Fletcher’s experience appears to be not uncommon. A young man from Texas who first signed on in 1861 as a member of the 5th Texas Infantry of Hood’s brigade, he wrote in his memoirs that in the first large camp he was assigned to after signing up, he contracted the measles. While in the hospital recovering from an associated extremely high fever, he became infested with lice and before being released, he contracted the mumps.

"In this camp we suffered a good deal with sickness—the most fatal I guess was measles. I had an attack of measles and was sent to the hospital in Richmond and remained there a few days and got tired of hospital life, so I tried to be a good boy and please the woman who had charge of the ward in which I was. I soon persuaded her to get me a discharge, and I returned to camp one cold, frosty morning; the next day I was hauled back a very sick man; was put in a small room that had a coal grate and was instructed to stay in bed and keep well covered up. I lay there a few days with a burning fever, taking such medicine as was prescribed. I had learned the “itch” [from lice] was getting to be a common complaint in the hospital, and after the fever had somewhat abated, I found I had it, so when the doctor made his next visit I drew my arms from under the covers and showed him the whelps or long red marks of itch, and he said he would send me some medicine that would cure it. "[i]

While encamped near Fredericksburg, Fletcher suffered from a severe attack of jaundice and was given a permit of sick leave. Rather than moving with his unit, he took a room in a Fredericksburg hotel where he received no medical care and almost died of food poisoning. [ii]  Cases like this – and worse – were common due to a lack of sanitary conditions, adequate food, clean water and trained medical care. Gerald Linderman confirms that “each army suffered two waves of disease,” the first being “acute infections of childhood.” [iii] Because those who survived the first wave developed immunities, the incidence abated over time. But it was followed by a second wave that decimated the ranks in ever increasing numbers. Considered “camp” diseases, dysentery, malaria, and diarrhea, took men in their tents and in hospitals by the thousands, reducing the effective fighting force of many units dramatically. [iv]

John D. Billings, in his memoir "Hard Tack and Coffee", brought up two important points about health in army camps. The first was that many men Hard Tack and Coffee by John Billings came to the army already ill. This was particularly true of the recruits in 1864 and 1865, “for those who have occasion to remember will agree that a sufficient number of men too old or diseased came to the front in those years – no, they did not all get as far as the front – to fairly stock all the hospitals in the country.” [v] Billings attributed this to both the incompetence of some of the doctors providing physical examinations for enlisting recruits and the desperation of the government willing to use marginal physicians and accept men clearly unfit for duty.

Billings also spoke of the presence in every company of men who feigned illness to escape duty. As might be expected, these men were seen as shirkers who burdened others in the company with the work they did not perform. These “beats on the government” showed up routinely at the sick tent to receive the care and, in some cases, medicine administered by the doctor. Quinine was the drug du jour “whether for stomach or bowels, headache or toothache, for a cough or for lameness, rheumatism or fever and ague.” [vi]  Some who feigned illness went so far as to refuse food and so created a real health crisis for themselves with varying consequences ranging from transfer to a hospital and eventual release from the service, to susceptibility to more severe and long term conditions. [vii]

The fact remains that many, many men died of very real and unwanted maladies. Diseases flourished in camp because of poor nutrition, inadequate sewage disposal, dirty water and infrequent bathing. Typhoid, measles, cholera and dysentery killed hundreds. Even General Lee contracted dysentery on his way to Gettysburg.  Billings spoke eloquently of his many friends who suffered and died of wasting illnesses, either in the field or in hospitals, away from the families who could have unquestionably cared for them better at home. [viii]

As James I. Robertson, Jr. pointed out in his book, Soldiers Blue and Gray, “more confederates died of illness during the seven week aftermath at Corinth than fell in the two days of intense fighting at Shiloh,” an aftermath not at all uncommon during the war and certainly after every battle. [ix]

Disease was – without question – the war’s biggest killer.

Copyright © 2010 Rene Tyree
i.  William A. Fletcher and Richard S. Wheeler, Rebel Private: Front and Rear: Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier, (Meridian: New York, 1995), 7.
ii. Ibid.
iii. Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War,  (The Free Press: New York, 1987), 115.
iv. Ibid.
v. John D. Billings, Hard Tack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (originally published in 1887 by George M. Smith and Company, Boston.), 173.
vi. Ibid., 175-176.
vii. Ibid., 175.
viii. Ibid.
ix. James I. Robertson, Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray, (University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, South Carolina ), 145.

From: wig-wags.com

Read More

The Complicated Birth of Midwifery

By Abby Norman on September 13, 2015

Around 353,000 babies are born every day. Some of them will be born in hospitals, others at home with the assistance of a midwife or doula, while others will make their grand entrance in the back of a car or ambulance somewhere in between home and hospital.

The history of childbirth, and in particular of midwifery, is a complicated and often cyclical one. Throughout 19th century America, midwives attended the majority of births, especially in the American South. Improved medicine and accompanying technologies meant that by the early 20th century, midwifery was highly discouraged, only to come around again when the natural birth movement was born in the 1960s.

In other words, the natural act of childbirth reflected the technological, social and medical beliefs and practices of the time. You can learn a lot about what life was like in a particular time period by examining societal attitudes toward childbirth.

16th Century
Midwives have been around since the beginning of human history. No doubt our caveman ancestors had other female tribe members help hold them up or stagger into a cave long enough to give birth. Even prior to modern language, some human acts require no verbal communication: coitus and childbirth among them.

If we start by looking at a period in history when midwifery became a specified community role, we’d start around 1522. At this point, elder females in communities worldwide ruled the roost when it came to helping younger women deliver babies. Having been licensed and educated in childbirth, midwives were highly respected community members. So much so that when they arrived to aid a laboring woman, it was the mom-to-be’s task to make the midwife feel at home and appreciated, offering her “groaning beer” or special cakes.

Midwife History Medieval
Thus childbirth became a very social event, where women close to the new mom would join the midwife in the home to cluck around, eat cake, drink and maybe lend a hand as the woman struggled. These women had a cute nickname, too: God sibs. Over time, the name morphed into a term you’re probably more familiar with: gossips.

Towards the middle of the century, and after hearing horror stories of childbirth fatalities, a family known as the Chamberlens created a tool that they believed would change the birthing game forever. They created the obstetric tool commonly known as forceps, and they guarded their invention ferociously.

They would often attend births with the tool hidden under their cloaks, blindfolding the mother so that she wouldn’t see it, and bang pots and pans to disguise the sound of the tool (which they feared, if heard, could give away the key to its design). It would be another two hundred years before forceps became widely used, in part because the original prototype would be discovered in the floorboards of the Chamberlens’ house long after the inventors had died.

Midwife History Experiments
The next major renaissance in midwifery and obstetrics came from the Antebellum South. Young doctors practiced suturing techniques on female slaves and often bought slaves specifically with that purpose in mind. Subsequently many common gynecological procedures were developed during this time, most notably the treatment of fistulas, tears that can occur during childbirth and lead to complicated infections if they aren’t repaired.

Victorian England
Across the pond, London’s destitute women were dying in droves of something called “childbed fever”, or puerperal fever. “Lying-in” hospitals, which were also cropping up in many U.S. cities during this time, were almost entirely dedicated to delivering the poorest women’s babies. It’s an interesting corollary to modern times, when giving birth to a baby in the hospital can cost up to $32,000.

As women came into the hospital to give birth—only to die within a week—young doctors were scurrying back and forth between the birthing room and the morgue to suss out why these women had died. Unfortunately, they weren’t washing their hands after conducting the autopsies, and continued to spread the very bacteria that had killed the women on whom they were performing autopsies to the otherwise healthy women in the ward.

Midwife History Crib
Luckily for the women of London, “germ theory” (what we would call bacteriology today) began to take hold in city hospitals, and new medical students were being taught proper hand washing and sterilization techniques. Not surprisingly, as soon as these simple innovations were added to lying-in protocols, the occurrence of childbed fever dropped dramatically.

PR damage had already been done, however, and most upper class Victorian women wouldn’t be caught dead in a hospital to give birth. Queen Victoria herself gave birth at Buckingham Palace—though, not without help. It was she who blew the next winds of change into midwifery in the form of ether.

Twilight Sleep

Midwife History Victoria
Word got out that the Queen herself had made use of ether to ease the pain of childbirth, and many religious figureheads were strongly opposed to it. Pain was the point of birth, because it was the punishment women endured on Eve’s behalf (eating the apple and all that). Queen Victoria thought that was hogwash, and many women followed suit. They began to regularly request not just the use of ether, but cocaine, marijuana and opium.

Obstetricians and occasionally midwives attended births at the homes of middle and upper class women, bringing along their drugs and tools. Given these women’s perceived delicate nature, many worried that if they were not relieved of childbirth pain, their babies would suffer because they would be too exhausted to parent. Thus, it was not the poor, inner city women of the lying-in hospitals who got the ether, but the countesses, duchesses and baronesses.

Midwife History Nurse
The decades wore on and women’s rights—particularly their reproductive rights—became a social focus in a way that they hadn’t been before. In the decades that would follow, women would essentially surrender themselves entirely to the childbirth process. They would kiss their husband goodbye, go into the hospital, be knocked out with a drug cocktail (called scopolamine) and wake up several hours later cleaned up with a pink, sleepy baby in their arms. This was Twilight Sleep.

What the women weren’t aware of, however, was that while they were in this “sleep” they were often strapped to the bed to keep from injuring themselves—or nurses—as they writhed about in agony. It wasn’t uncommon for them to be put in padded pens so that they couldn’t escape during the birth, which was often a problem considering the drug cocktail was known to cause vivid hallucinations. But since women woke up from Twilight Sleep with no memory of the birth, they had no complaints and hailed it as a revolution.

Natural Birth Movement and Lamaze

Natural Birth Figures
Childbirth became largely medicalized during the early to mid 20th century. Women went into the hospital, had their Twilight Sleep, and woke up fresh-faced with a baby in their arms. The baby went home and a woman had the wise words of Dr. Benjamin Spock to guide them in child-rearing. The supportive, female-empowering and maternal community of midwives had been somewhat forgotten—along with the entire childbirth experience, thanks to scopolamine.

As the Gestalt theory of psychology, being more in touch with one’s inner experience, became more prevalent, the idea that a woman should be an active and aware participant in the birth of her child soon followed. This was the basis for Dr. Lamaze’s work, which followed in the footsteps of Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov. Remembered largely for his studies with salivating dogs, Pavlovian psychology had one key offering to laboring mothers: the art of mental preparation.

Dr. Lamaze was convinced by the idea of “psychoprophalaxis”: if a woman could convince herself that she was ready to give birth, then she would be. By psychologically conditioning herself for the reality of giving birth, she could manage her pain without drugs. This idea was further ingrained into the minds of women everywhere when Dr. Grantly Dick-Read published his formidable tome, Natural Childbirth, in the 1970s. Dr. Dick-Read promoted the idea that childbirth itself wasn’t painful, women just made it painful by worrying about it.

Yoga Moms
This was the foundation for the Lamaze classes of the ‘80s, which have by contemporary standards almost become a trope: a room full of heavily pregnant women, their birth partners, and a lot of “hee hee hoo hoo” going on. The co-founder of Lamaze, Elizabeth Bing, also taught many of the courses and lauded the technique.

That is, of course, until she had her own children.

In an interview many decades later, Bing admits that she not just requested—but demanded—an epidural and drug relief when she gave birth to her son. Despite decades of debunking the necessity of either to thousands of women, she wasn’t even a little bit sorry.

Modern Times

In today’s world, women have more options than ever before when it comes to having babies on their own terms—at least when it comes to delivery (abortion restrictions in the U.S. continue to abound) and, assuming a woman has health insurance to pay for the costly services. They can choose home births, hospital births, hospital births with a midwife, doulas, water births, planned cesarean sections or, if they’ve had a c-section before, they can opt for a “VBAC” —a vaginal birth after cesarean.

Regardless of what the mother has in her birth plan, one thing has been true about childbirth since the dawn of time: the baby is the one that decides when it’s time to be born.

Abby Norman is an author based in New England. Her memoir FLARE has been acquired by Nation Books (Hachette). Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, Medium, Hippocampus Magazine, The Atlantic, The Mary Sue and The Huffington Post.

From: all-that-is-interesting.com

Read More

Connecticut Sanitary Fair

From: connecticuthistory.org

On July 25, 1864, the Stamford Ladies Soldiers’ Aid Society held a Sanitary Fair. Sanitary Fairs were established in response to the needs of Civil War soldiers beyond what the government could supply. The United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization, was authorized by the government in 1861. The primary objective of the commission was to collect supplies, provide support to soldiers’ homes, transport the sick, supply food, and to provide services to discharged soldiers.

The Stamford Ladies Soldiers’ Aid Society held their fair to raise money for medical supplies for men in Union hospitals by selling a stamp that they had issued at a cost of 15 cents. These stamps were not the usual postage stamp but a drop letter stamp in which mail would be held at the post office and called for by the addressee.

Read More