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Publication

The perils of birth: obstetrics, religion and medical ethics in Belgium (ca. 1830-1914)

Book - Dissertation

In this doctoral thesis, I examine the role of ideology and medical ethics in the scientific debates and medical practices of Belgian Catholic and liberal doctors from 1830 until 1914. The focus is on the question of difficult births. The brutal reality of labour complications, often resulting in maternal or foetal death, led Catholic and liberal physicians to reflect on their mission as doctors and on the religious and moral implications of their obstetric practices in the birthing room. This dialectic relationship between the development of medical debates about labour complications and the management of difficult births forms a common thread throughout this thesis. In order to shed light on their debates and practices, most of my research has involved analysing texts about obstetric intervention in medical periodicals. An important part of the research has focused on digitised scientific medical journals. The methodology I used to investigate the three digitised journals consists of a blend of distant reading and close reading. Distant reading refers to the use of text-mining techniques to analyse large corpora of text that exceed the limit of what scholars are able to examine by using traditional methods of discourse analysis. Using the digital tool AntConc, I searched the corpus for keywords related to religion and obstetrics. With close reading methods I refer to the hermeneutical analysis of the context in which the search queries (words or word combinations) appear: the paragraphs, the articles and journal sections of which the articles were a part. In addition to my research in the three medical journals, I used two major obstetric debates as the starting point for further analysis: the biggest debate concerned the question of obstructed labour and the different obstetric interventions to deliver women with small pelvises. The second debate centred on the methods to baptise unborn children in peril of death. Both debates featured prominently in medical publications, the main sources of this study. To a lesser extent, I have also researched a wide array of sources from the political, legal and theological domain to approach physicians' ideas and debates from other than medical perspectives. Overall, the studied medical debates and practices in the period 1830-1914 show that ideological clashes in scientific settings, such as medical meeting rooms and medical journals, were never initiated by political statements or developments. Ideology entered the meeting room in the context of discussions about medical innovations and experiments. The introduction of obstetric procedures such as medical abortion that ended in the certain death of the foetus led Catholic and liberal physicians to reflect on their mission as doctors and on the religious and moral implications of their obstetric practices in the birthing room. In reverse, too, there was a productive dynamic between the presence of ideological conflict in debates and the development of technology. Technological inventions or physicians' efforts to improve obstetric procedures were often informed by considerations of moral and religious nature. These conclusions show how rewarding it is to study the interrelation between medical knowledge, the methods and settings of scientific debate, as well as the philosophical beliefs and religiously-inspired conduct of physicians. Taken together, they profoundly shaped the ideas and practices of doctors.
Publication year:2021
Accessibility:Closed