Averting Miscarriage in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Early modern medical texts and family recipe books abound with drinks, powders, poultices, plasters, and baths intended to prevent miscarriages. These remedies use a dizzying array of ingredients, ranging from common herbs to expensive imported spices. In The Midwives Book (1671), Jane Sharp (ca. 1641–1671) recommends a powder made of red coral, ivory shavings, mastic, and nutmeg to prevent miscarriage. In his handwritten recipe book, Thomas Sheppey (fl. 1675) advises distilling a placenta and drinking the resulting liquid in white wine and cinnamon water. Other miscarriage preventives involve rosemary, sage, tansy, and ingredients imported from Mexico and South America. How do these remedies relate to early modern understandings of the causes of miscarriage? Medical writers since antiquity explained that miscarriages happen because the fetus is only loosely attached to the womb in the first two or three months after conception and is easily separated and expelled if the pregnant woman jumps up and down, dances, has sex, sneezes, coughs, lifts heavy objects, or gets too emotional. Yet the sheer array of ingredients suggests a more complicated understanding of the causes of miscarriage, one that does not always place the blame on women for carelessly or deliberately shaking the fetus out of the uterus. Some ingredients, like sage and tansy, had a variety of reproductive uses, including contraception, menstrual regulation, and abortion. Many, like mastic, coral, and ivory had astringent properties and were used to stop and dry up fluxes of blood. Still others, like rosemary, operated by warming and strengthening the womb, helping it retain the fetus. Remedies for miscarriage give us a more nuanced account of how women and their families understood and experienced miscarriages in early modern Europe.