One Family Kept a Childbirth Secret for 100 Years.

Giving birth before modern medicine: what it was really like for ordinary women in England, and the one family who kept a tool that could save a stuck baby to themselves for about a hundred years. In the early 1800s, a woman living in an old house in Essex found hinges in the floor of a closet. Under the trapdoor was a chest, and in it were the Chamberlen family's forceps. While they kept them secret, every other woman gave birth the old way: with her friends, the gossips, a licensed midwife who had sworn an oath before the bishop, and a stone tied to her leg for luck. It covers the real odds (not the "one in three" you may have heard), Elizabeth Joscelin, who bought her own burial sheet when she first felt her baby move, the surgeon who crawled into a birth room on his hands and knees so the mother would not know a man was there, and how the secret finally leaked. Chapters 0:00 The chest under the floor 0:52 The gossips and the midwife's oath 2:16 Girdles and eagle stones 3:21 The lying-in and churching 3:44 The real odds 4:34 Elizabeth Joscelin, and the man on his knees 5:29 The Chamberlen secret 6:37 Paris, and the leak 7:28 Men come into the room 8:37 The chest in the closet Sources include Percival Willughby, Observations in Midwifery; Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (1671); Elizabeth Joscelin, The Mothers Legacie to her Unborne Childe (1624); the Diary of Ralph Josselin; Alice Thornton's Books; H. H. Carwardine in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions (1818); Doreen Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London; and Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution.