Childbirth in Medieval ages

Childbirth has never been fun, but as terrible as it is today, it used to be a lot worse. In the medieval times, doctors didn’t really have a lot of ideas on how to keep an expecting mother from dying. Pretty well the only thing they knew how to do was to rely on divine intervention—so that’s exactly what they did.

Monks and midwives would sit by a pregnant woman and pray, calling on the child to come out “without dying, and without the death of your mother.” Or else they would rely on magic. Sometimes, they’d feed a woman vinegar and sugar and cover her in eagle’s dung, kind of just hoping that eagle poop might be something that keeps women alive.

When magic failed, they just prayed for a miracle. An abbey in Yorkshire kept a holy, sacred girdle on hand at all times, convinced that it had magical powers that would keep a woman alive through a pregnancy. They weren’t the only ones who believed in it, either. When Henry III’s wife became pregnant, he ordered the monks to bring him the sacred girdle.