Obstetrics and the Disabled Maternal Body in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain

FAIN: FEL-272422-21

Ann Louise Kibbie
Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME 04011-8447)

Research and writing leading to a book on the medical dilemmas of treating pregnant women in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Employing the methodologies of feminist and disability studies, literary criticism, and the history of medicine, this study focuses on the most haunting problem faced by nineteenth-century obstetricians: cases of women whose pelvises were distorted by rickets. These women could carry a fetus to term, but could not give birth naturally. In such cases, obstetricians had three options: to stand by as both mother and child died; to save the mother by destroying the fetus in utero and delivering it in pieces; or to perform a Caesarean section, which was tantamount to a death sentence for the mother. Thus, medical professionals were forced to weigh the life of the mother against the life of the unborn child, whose value was as yet unknown; and the mother’s own disability was, itself, a factor in this calculus. This project explores representations of these cases in literary and medical discourse; in the new discipline of statistical analysis; and in Victorian medical photography.