Anne Løkke

Mrs Stone and Dr Smellie: British eighteenth-century birth attendance and long-run levels and trends in maternal mortality discussed in a north European context

This is a book review turned research paper. The aim is to estimate the differences in the maternal mortality rate (MMR) between untrained midwives, expert midwives, and the famous obstetrician Dr Smellie in eighteenth-century Britain. The paper shows that the birth attendance practices of the expert midwife Mrs Stone and of Dr Smellie were very similar, though Stone used her hands whereas Smellie used forceps. Both applied the same invasive techniques to successfully deliver women with similar fatal complications, techniques that untrained midwives and most surgeons of the time could not perform. However, the same procedures, if used for normal births, would have increased the MMR. So, the key to the low MMR of both was that they kept interventions away from the majority of births that were normal. The paper quantifies the likely MMR for a ‘Stone and Smellie style’ birth attendance and concludes that the wider dissemination of their techniques can explain the decline in the British MMR.

Responsibility and Emotions: Parental, Governmental and Almighty Responses to Infant Deaths in Denmark in the Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

This chapter examines emotional responses to the death of unbaptized infants in Evangelical Lutheran Denmark. What kind of afterlife could be expected for such infants according to the church, and did the teachings of the church influence the emotional responses of parents? The memoirs of an eighteenth-century father, who lost nine of his eleven children, reveal a close connection between the writings of the early Lutheran church and the way he (two hundred years later) consoled himself while grieving for his children. He felt assured that God took responsibility for stillborn as well as unbaptized infants, so he did not fear for their salvation. However, a tension between this old Lutheran teaching and a simpler, magical understanding of the necessity of baptism for salvation is also present across the centuries, not only among peasants in the countryside, but also in nineteenth-century administrative practices, which saw stillborn and unbaptized infants as outcasts from Christian society.