7 ms·

Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe

46 points by benbreen 4y ago

arketyp 4y ago
The similarities between ontogeny and phylogeny is well-known in modern biology. I wonder how the belief in a Creator in earlier times influenced the seemingly prevalent idea that humans come pre-conceived like monads in the womb and then simply scale up during development on through childhood to adulthood. Kids in old paintings typically also looked like mere (linearly) down-sized adults.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  I thought was simply impossible for our predecessors to understand embryonic development until the development of optics for sufficient magnification to see what was happening so we know many of the ancient Greeks had similar misconceptions that were continued in one way or another until disproved.
  - arketyp 4y ago
    I'm not saying they should have known better. You're probably right that technological limitations played a part. On the other hand it doesn't require a microscope to see that a baby is born with different proportions than an adult. My point is that it seems like that aspect of reality was almost disregarded; seen maybe, but not recognized as of much importance. And why would that be?
    - stevenwoo 4y ago
      Agenda and what was taught by leading schools of thought just steered beliefs for a long time. Just from reading several laymen's books on genetics they tell pretty much the same story. Maybe those books have a slant their own that I cannot see, either, or the narrative guides what details are included. During the initial extended period of at home time of covid-19 pandemic I read The Gene: An Intimate History, I Contain Multitudes, and She Has Her Mother's Laugh and for different parts of science history illustrate similar if not the same issue. There were starts and stops in advances even after microscopes were able to see what was happening. Mendel got lucky that his pea plants fit into the classic 2x2 matrix we simplify into thinking about dominant recessive traits, the other plant he studied stymied him until his death because it did not fit into that matrix and he did not see into the cells to understand what was happening only that his meticulous planting and mating of different genetic lines did not match and confounded the results from his prior years long study that we learn about from elementary biology lessons in school. He was fortunate in his study of pea plants with simple inheritance traits and very unlucky in his choice of a second plant to replicate his pea success. It took forty years for other scientists to replicate his initial studies and papers and for his ideas to get more acceptance. Somewhat relatedly, around the same time animal husbandry was possibly the height of genetic science of its time since the middle ages and society derived the idea that purity of royal blood was something to be valued and gave us the weird inbreeding of the house of Hanover and others in Europe. It boils down to hypothesis and verification via experiment and it was mostly guesswork before microscopes since complex genetic interactions (much more than peas) are present in many life forms.
- User23 4y ago
  That was an artistic choice. I can assure you that people in a culture where it was common for families to have over seven children that survived knew exactly what babies actually looked like.
  - arketyp 4y ago
    My point was also this, that the theo-philosophical idea shaped the artistic choice.
dvh 4y ago
Da Vinci seems more accurate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Views_of_a_Foetus_in_the_Womb.jpg/440px-Views_of_a_Foetus_in_the_Womb.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Vi...
- nier 4y ago
  That’s because he was able to base his drawings on cadavers that were first cut open and studied before being buried in the ground or turned to ashes.
iandanforth 4y ago
This seems absurd and insulting "it fundamentally reformulated midwifery as an active process of aid, rather than a passive attendance on an inherently invisible, mysterious, and uncertain event." Has the author ever met a farmer? You don't get sheep and cows to give birth without getting elbow (or shoulder) deep sometimes. People know how this stuff works and have for a very very long time.
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  A common kind of gobshitery to read these days, to make the straightforward into 'mysterious', 'unexplored' etc. to try and intrigue the reader into thinking they're being given some kind of deep and exclusive information. It's not caviar its fish and chips, and there's nothing wrong with that.
  - voldacar 4y ago
    It feels like this kind of language use only came into vogue during the last few decades, but is now extremely common in humanities academia as well as pseudointellectual "cultural" publications such as the New Yorker and this one. - "an active process of aid" etc. Trying to describe simple or obvious things using vague language with a sort of "conceptual" flavor or affectation. It reminds me a little bit of the "translation" of Ecclesiastes in Orwell's Politics and the English Language but it also has its own distinct flavor. The French are probably to blame, somehow. edit: Blah blah blah Foucault a few paragraphs in. You can't make this shit up
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      > but is now extremely common in humanities academia as well as pseudointellectual "cultural" publications such as the New Yorker and this one And from there it runs downhill to the rats living in the bilge of the comments section. I can't recall the number of times I've heard some simple concept churched up with all manner of 7-10 letter adjectives in an effort to sound sophisticated.
      - 4y ago
t344344 4y ago
I found article a bit naive. 99% midwifes in 17th century were functionally illiterate (only read to recite in church) and had no access to medical books. Their skills came from veterinary practice, delivering cows, horses, pigs, dogs, kittens and so on. It was all very practical and pragmatic. Reading was used for prayers. Pictures used on books were more for esoteric and philosophical use. Thats why babies had head proportional sized to adults. Every moron knew babies had large heads compared to their bodies.
- starkd 4y ago
  Some of those images showed the infant with surprising muscle definition. With those arms, it looked like that baby was about to deliver himself.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I can't imagine these illustrations were made by or even in consultation with midwives either. The midwives possibly did have fairly sophisticated models for understanding and evaluation of things like fetal position but they probably would have depicted them differently and I doubt anyone asked them.
sandworm101 4y ago
Lots of criticism for the accuracy of the medieval drawing shared in this article, but accuracy isn't always the point. Even in modern medical texts, picture-perfect accuracy isn't always the priority. Think of these images more as diagrams for medical situations. They are meant to communicate an idea, not be a photograph. Think of all those parents trying to see their babies in ultrasound images. An ultrasound may be a pixel-accurate representation drawn from reality, but a hand-drawn stick figure diagram would probably better communicate what is actually going on.

46 points by benbreen 4y ago

The similarities between ontogeny and phylogeny is well-known in modern biology. I wonder how the belief in a Creator in earlier times influenced the seemingly prevalent idea that humans come pre-conceived like monads in the womb and then simply scale up during development on through childhood to adulthood. Kids in old paintings typically also looked like mere (linearly) down-sized adults.

stevenwoo 4y ago
I thought was simply impossible for our predecessors to understand embryonic development until the development of optics for sufficient magnification to see what was happening so we know many of the ancient Greeks had similar misconceptions that were continued in one way or another until disproved.
- arketyp 4y ago
  I'm not saying they should have known better. You're probably right that technological limitations played a part. On the other hand it doesn't require a microscope to see that a baby is born with different proportions than an adult. My point is that it seems like that aspect of reality was almost disregarded; seen maybe, but not recognized as of much importance. And why would that be?
  - stevenwoo 4y ago
    Agenda and what was taught by leading schools of thought just steered beliefs for a long time. Just from reading several laymen's books on genetics they tell pretty much the same story. Maybe those books have a slant their own that I cannot see, either, or the narrative guides what details are included. During the initial extended period of at home time of covid-19 pandemic I read The Gene: An Intimate History, I Contain Multitudes, and She Has Her Mother's Laugh and for different parts of science history illustrate similar if not the same issue. There were starts and stops in advances even after microscopes were able to see what was happening. Mendel got lucky that his pea plants fit into the classic 2x2 matrix we simplify into thinking about dominant recessive traits, the other plant he studied stymied him until his death because it did not fit into that matrix and he did not see into the cells to understand what was happening only that his meticulous planting and mating of different genetic lines did not match and confounded the results from his prior years long study that we learn about from elementary biology lessons in school. He was fortunate in his study of pea plants with simple inheritance traits and very unlucky in his choice of a second plant to replicate his pea success. It took forty years for other scientists to replicate his initial studies and papers and for his ideas to get more acceptance. Somewhat relatedly, around the same time animal husbandry was possibly the height of genetic science of its time since the middle ages and society derived the idea that purity of royal blood was something to be valued and gave us the weird inbreeding of the house of Hanover and others in Europe. It boils down to hypothesis and verification via experiment and it was mostly guesswork before microscopes since complex genetic interactions (much more than peas) are present in many life forms.
User23 4y ago
That was an artistic choice. I can assure you that people in a culture where it was common for families to have over seven children that survived knew exactly what babies actually looked like.
- arketyp 4y ago
  My point was also this, that the theo-philosophical idea shaped the artistic choice.

dvh 4y ago

Da Vinci seems more accurate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Views_of_a_Foetus_in_the_Womb.jpg/440px-Views_of_a_Foetus_in_the_Womb.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Vi...

nier 4y ago
That’s because he was able to base his drawings on cadavers that were first cut open and studied before being buried in the ground or turned to ashes.

iandanforth 4y ago

This seems absurd and insulting "it fundamentally reformulated midwifery as an active process of aid, rather than a passive attendance on an inherently invisible, mysterious, and uncertain event." Has the author ever met a farmer? You don't get sheep and cows to give birth without getting elbow (or shoulder) deep sometimes. People know how this stuff works and have for a very very long time.

_a_a_a_ 4y ago
A common kind of gobshitery to read these days, to make the straightforward into 'mysterious', 'unexplored' etc. to try and intrigue the reader into thinking they're being given some kind of deep and exclusive information. It's not caviar its fish and chips, and there's nothing wrong with that.
- voldacar 4y ago
  It feels like this kind of language use only came into vogue during the last few decades, but is now extremely common in humanities academia as well as pseudointellectual "cultural" publications such as the New Yorker and this one. - "an active process of aid" etc. Trying to describe simple or obvious things using vague language with a sort of "conceptual" flavor or affectation. It reminds me a little bit of the "translation" of Ecclesiastes in Orwell's Politics and the English Language but it also has its own distinct flavor. The French are probably to blame, somehow. edit: Blah blah blah Foucault a few paragraphs in. You can't make this shit up
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    > but is now extremely common in humanities academia as well as pseudointellectual "cultural" publications such as the New Yorker and this one And from there it runs downhill to the rats living in the bilge of the comments section. I can't recall the number of times I've heard some simple concept churched up with all manner of 7-10 letter adjectives in an effort to sound sophisticated.
    - 4y ago

t344344 4y ago

I found article a bit naive. 99% midwifes in 17th century were functionally illiterate (only read to recite in church) and had no access to medical books. Their skills came from veterinary practice, delivering cows, horses, pigs, dogs, kittens and so on. It was all very practical and pragmatic. Reading was used for prayers. Pictures used on books were more for esoteric and philosophical use. Thats why babies had head proportional sized to adults. Every moron knew babies had large heads compared to their bodies.

starkd 4y ago
Some of those images showed the infant with surprising muscle definition. With those arms, it looked like that baby was about to deliver himself.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
I can't imagine these illustrations were made by or even in consultation with midwives either. The midwives possibly did have fairly sophisticated models for understanding and evaluation of things like fetal position but they probably would have depicted them differently and I doubt anyone asked them.

sandworm101 4y ago

Lots of criticism for the accuracy of the medieval drawing shared in this article, but accuracy isn't always the point. Even in modern medical texts, picture-perfect accuracy isn't always the priority. Think of these images more as diagrams for medical situations. They are meant to communicate an idea, not be a photograph. Think of all those parents trying to see their babies in ultrasound images. An ultrasound may be a pixel-accurate representation drawn from reality, but a hand-drawn stick figure diagram would probably better communicate what is actually going on.