just anchor it down and watch the tide rising.
I hope you sent her more than just a store-bought card on Sunday. Because she remembers that day very clearly too.
I think the big turnaround was figuring out proper sanitation. At this house, they were talking about how the doctor might come over to attend a troublesome birth or newborn, having not washed his hands after just handling a dead body at his previous stop. So, I guess it all seemed pretty mysterious until people started feeling they could actually affect disease spreading rather than just all the mumbo jumbo that came before. I know people like to think our ancestors had all this wisdom with their herbs and such, but they were also kind of desperate without much actual understanding of how diseases spread. I do think that when modern medicine came around that there was too much of a tendency to discredit what people had figured out by trial and error. Once people sort of figured out disease control, then I think they started to think they could control accidents and other safety issues too using the same scientific approach.
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Pregnant women who were attended by midwives had a much better survival rate than women who were attended by doctors or who went to hospitals (once those were developed). That’s largely due to the not-spreading-disease-from-the-dying factor, but also it’s true that quite a few of those old-fashioned herbal remedies were actually pretty good. Tea made from slippery elm bark is a great example: it’s aspirin in its natural form.
Oddly, on that subject, I just heard about this guy on an old episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage…
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Yes, that’s what I think got lost with the “science is better” approach. I had my daughter with midwives attending because hospitals are germy and the nurses do most of the work anyhow. But I think it’s easy to romanticize the past; a lot of women died without c-sections being an option and now that’s very rare. For a healthy mother without complicating situations, I think midwives are the way to go.
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