Pregnancy

[Christa Erin Pereira]

My friends and I were discussing this the other day but does anyone know how pregnancy was detected back then? You know, apart from missed periods and nausea.

Who's game to give this one a shot?

 

[monica e. hall]

Me.

Could be some info on this site, Christa, as it has a time-line of pregancy-testing.
http://pregnancy.about.com/od/pregnancytests/

My old grannies, who were young women in 1912, seemed to take pregnancy for granted on a 1 - 2 yearly basis, so I doubt if anyone bothered to test for it. It was all too prevalent; large families, worn-out women etc.

After 7 live births and 3 miscarriages, my grandparents' doctor hauled my grandfather into his surgery to inform him that one more child would kill my grandmother - leaving him to raise the children alone - and suggested he took some 'suitable contraceptive measures'. My grandfather, sadly, thought only of himself, and announced he wasn't prepared to jeopardise his own health and happiness in such a trivial cause. He was, apparently, convinced that condoms gravely restricted the blood flow etc. Faced with such disregard for her own situation, I think Granny resorted to "No!" Anyway - she outlived him by about 15 years, eventually dying at the age of 96. Who says there's no justice?

 

[Brian Ahern]

Monica - the amazing thing is that you know this!

If my elders did the deed, I don't want to know about it. I like to think they went to church and prayed for children and some just appeared somehow.

 

[monica e. hall]

Brace up, Brian! It's just life.

My family - apart from me - are all medics. So, I suppose, that's how I know.

 

[Brian Ahern]

It begs the interesting question of how knowledgeable or ignorant your average young person would have been about these matters in 1912.

The lives of Dorothy Gibson, Harriet Crosby and others make you think sex was not as taboo to them as we think.

But then there's Edith Wharton who said it wasn't until several weeks AFTER her wedding that she finally managed to find out where babies come from.

Or my friend's Nan, a Yorkshire country girl giving birth a few decades after Titanic. She was writhing in pain and begging the midwife to tell her "how it was going to come out". The midwife looked at her incredulously and said - in her broadest Yorkie accent - "How's it going to come out?!? Same way it bloody went in, luv!"

 

[Noel F. Jones]

What goes up...

I'm reminded of a convivial occasion in port in the engineer's smokeroom where the chief engineer was complaining of having had to travel in a colleague's cramped sports car "curled up like an embryo".

"What's an embryo?" a guest member of the company asked ingenuously (he was something of a character, a Scotsman and a batchelor to boot).

On seeing the quizzical looks directed his way he felt compelled to add "Och, well I'm no' an engineer...".

Noel

 

[monica e. hall]

Obviously a man who'd managed to bypass vast tracts of biological human life then, Noel. I've known a few like that. They always seem very contented indeed to me, which I suppose, ought to tell us something. Though quite what, I don't know.

I've tried to track down how the family knew about Grandad, Brian, and it seems to stem from Granny in her late 80s, talking to a pharmacist son who had the sense to spend hours asking her about her life (so much is lost through people not doing this - in her life she went from bustles to mini-skirts, though not personally of course, and from horse-drawn carriages to Concorde).

Anyway, it seems I was wrong, and Granny did not resort to "No!" She resorted to Rendall's tablets - a female contraceptive of doubtful efficacy. Happily, they worked for Granny though. She confided to her incredulous son the information that they were so efficient, one dud tablet was deliberately put into every tube, for fear the human population might otherwise seriously decline. Granny used to carefully examine every tablet, to try to detect the dud.

How naive it seems to us. Yet how sensible, in those days, for someone trying desperately to fulfil her duty to her entire family, and to live to tell the tale.

 

[Michael H. Standart]

>>She resorted to Rendall's tablets - a female contraceptive of doubtful efficacy. Happily, they worked for Granny though.<<

That or her system reached the point where something there said "Enough is enough." Given enough wear and tear, it's entirely possible that any fertilized ova found no place to implant or were lost so early on that she had no idea that anything had happened at all beyond the obvious "Good Times."

Just what was in Randall's Tablets anyway? I doubt that contemporary medical science had any sort of really good understanding of how hormones worked much less how to identify them.

 

[Bob Godfrey]

Wife's Friend was the brand name of Mr Rendell's 'tablets', which were actually soluble pessaries made from cocoa butter with a dash of quinine. They - er - weren't designed to be taken orally. They were marketed in England from the 1880s right up until the 1940s, and apparently were not entirely ineffective.

 

[Noel F. Jones]

Monica:

To give him the benefit of the doubt I'd say it was more a failure of vocabulary than anatomy.

Noel

 

[Michael H. Standart]

>>They - er - weren't designed to be taken orally.<<

Mmmmmm...yeah...got it.

>>They were marketed in England from the 1880s right up until the 1940s, and apparently were not entirely ineffective.<<

As a contraceptive, I would think not. The quinine would have been useful for dealing with malaria, but not if used in the manner prescribed by the maker.

 

[Bob Godfrey]

Sometimes Grannie knows best, Mike. Mr Rendell was on the right track, even if he didn't have the resources to arrive at the ideal formulation. Modern research has led to the production of spermicidal creams based on vegetable oils and quinine hydrochloride that are regarded as not only safer but also often more effective than the synthetic and hormone-based products of the more recent past.

 

[monica e. hall]

Re therapeutics, Granny also used to say "If it hurts, it's doing you good." I'm not altogether sure she was right about that, though.... I'm glad that my parents rejected the idea of a mustard poultice for my chest in favour of antibiotics when I was 4. But, of course, there were no antibiotics when she was raising her 7.

 

[Bob Godfrey]

And of course "the worse the taste, the more good it will do ya". In a Great War documentary on TV last week, an old soldier remarked that the castor oil supplied for engine lubrication was great for dealing with cases of constipation, on those rare occasions when the prospect of 'going over the top' didn't get the job done. Forty years later we were still suffering the same treatment, though our supply came in a bottle from the pharmacy rather than from a 2-gallon can of Castrol.
.

 

[monica e. hall]

Another fine motto to live by, Bob. He must have been a very old soldier indeed - not that extraordinary 108-year old, by any chance, who looks and sounds like a sprightly 80-year old? I saw him last week on TV, and instantly felt about 109 myself. If indeed, "the worse the taste, the more good it will do ya", then I suppose a diet of whisky and Fishermen's Friends should see me into a fine old age.