A Medieval Woman Wore ‘Birthing Girdle’ to Protect Herself During Labor | Hacker News Reader

A Medieval Woman Wore ‘Birthing Girdle’ to Protect Herself During Labor

smithsonianmag.com

57 pointsdiodorus28 comments

Read the underlying study.

What a stretch.

There were proteins and peptides on the parchment from honey, eggs, cereals, sheep, as well as humans and mice.

The human ‘cervical fluid’ proteins, from what I can tell, aren’t unique to the cervical fluid and, unless I’m reading the study referred to in the paper incorrectly, the ‘list’ of CVF proteins came from non-pregnant women.

I’m not saying the parchment wasn’t associated with pregnancy... hell, women today wear all kinds of elastic supports; nothing new about it.

But the scientific mumbo-jumbo is depressing as it reveals how silly these suppositions based on suppositions based on presumptions based on assumptions can get.

For instance, this bit — from the article, not the study (although a similar statement is made in the study) — makes me pull my hair out:

“ Signs of wear on the girdle’s surface suggest that someone felt, caressed or kissed it, according to the study.”

Really?! A worn portion of a dirty 500 year old parchment leads us to imagine kissing or caressing it?!

Publish or perish is difficult when you've got clay pot pieces to assemble into a narrative interesting enough for an audience.

Your entire comment history is a giant expert fallacy. Maybe try and do better.

Please make your substantive points without personal attack, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://anildash.com/2011/07/20/if_your_websites_full_of_ass...

> the scientific mumbo-jumbo is depressing as it reveals how silly these suppositions based on suppositions based on presumptions based on assumptions can get. ... For instance, this bit

The study[0] says:

"The images on the manuscript are particularly worn, especially those likely to be touched, rubbed or kissed as part of religious veneration, such as the nearly rubbed-out green crucifix, attesting to its use (figure 1)"

and has a picture for you to see for yourself. It doesn't seem particularly silly to me.

Also it says "severe abrasions implies that it was often touched or kissed, and accords with widespread evidence of medieval votive practices, where an image was kissed or rubbed so frequently the image is worn and blurred" and links to a rather fascinating 56-page paper (with lots of beautiful photos of illuminated manuscripts) on the subject, "Kissing images, unfurling rolls, measuring wounds, sewing badges and carrying talismans: considering some Harley manuscripts through the physical rituals they reveal".[1]

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202055

[1] https://www.bl.uk/eblj/2011articles/pdf/ebljarticle52011.pdf

Some years ago I saw an article on HN I think, where an archeologist comment on this.

He said, paraphrasing:

"You see, we keep finding those statues of penis, and people create crazy explanations of how it is a religions icon and whatnot. But know what? It is probably just a funny statue because people think making penis statues is hilarious."

This one is always particularly weird for me since there's an unbroken tradition of penis ornaments and decorations

For those unfamiliar, "The Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay is a satirical introduction to archeology.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Motel+of+the+Mysteries+by+David+Ma...

>According to the Guardian, historians posit that childbirth was the main cause of death for English women between the late 5th and 11th centuries; the study notes that the neonatal mortality rate during this period was between 30 and 60 percent.

Good lord. I can't imagine all the ways in which that fact weighed on culture, from religiosity (the only way to have a feeling of control) to relations between men and women (sex has a chance of death).

It was probably not worth investing into education of women either if they had high chances of dying during the inevitable childbirth happening some day in their lives. Émilie du Châtelet died during childbirth.

Shuddering at the thought of perceiving women at nothing but pretty incubators, and I wonder how many societies still function in this way today after seeing a video about Kogi women.

You should be thankful, not shuddering over humans doing what they had to for survival. You wouldn’t be here today without it.

The 30-60% chance of death is the infant mortality rate, not the risk of mothers dying in childbirth.

If women had even a 30% chance of dying in childbirth, it would be very difficult to maintain replacement levels of birthrates (as each woman, on average, needs to have 2 children).

Well it was very common to have 5+ kids even 100 years ago. Some sources say 5-6 was an average number of pregnancies.

I think you might be reading this incorrectly. It might be not that every pregnancy had a 30% chance to kill a woman, but that the cause of death of 30% of women was child birth complications. E.g. 70% of women probably had many pregnancies and lived after, and in the other 30% some might have actually went through 2+ pregnancies before dying during one.

It's curious to wonder when did humans begin associating words and writings with magic and special powers? Actually, when did pre-modern-human apes begin thinking about magic at all?

Magic is older than humans. Animals rely on magic -- subtle intentional interactions with quantum mechanics in their everyday lives, it is second nature to them. For a take on it accessible to someone with a science-centered mindset, try looking at the book Entangled Minds. Not just "higher" animals, even earthworms. We humans think we're so much smarter, though... We deny even the possibility of its existence :)

Amazing to see how quickly my comment is downvoted away, within seconds. You must be very quick at checking your references. Try this thread posted parallel to my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26449135

Your comment is being downvoted because you're using the word 'magic' to refer to quantum mechanics that are generally imperceptible at the larger scale (including earthworms), in response to a comment specifically using the term 'magic' to refer to ritualistic behavior that's intended to (but doesn't) cause a desired result.

If it is imperceptible, then how can you tell whether or not it works?

I googled Entangled Minds, apparently "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality" by Dean Radin. Immediately I thought "Oh, I guess that's quantum in the meaningless "woo" sense, like Deepak Chopra" and scrolling down the amazon page was a blurb by Chopra! – "Dean Radin brings parapsychology into mainstream science. The revolution has begun." Radin is a parapsychologist, even a former President of the Parapsychological Association. I consulted wikipedia on parapsychology, to refresh - it's been a very long while. The article begins

"Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, as in telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, a.k.a. telekinesis, and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. It is considered to be pseudoscience by a vast majority of mainstream scientists, in part because, in addition to a lack of replicable empirical evidence, parapsychological claims simply cannot be true "unless the rest of science isn't." ... Parapsychology has been criticised for continuing investigation despite being unable to provide convincing evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research."

Uh, possibly fair enough. But apparently in his book

"Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests."

A good summary of the book, thank you.

Actually, I think your point is very interesting. I have observed unusual behavior in animals that could easily be attributed to ‚precognition‘ - magic!

Yet, for them, it's just another survival tactic.

Well, take a hound dog, for example. He has many, many, many more olfactory cells in his snout than humans. Imagine you and a dog are hiking along some unmarked trail. The dog, unbeknownst to you, notices the smell of gas. Maybe it bothers her, and she decides to walk away from there. You follow the dog, away from the trail, and discover that a couple of hours later, there's an explosion at the exact spot. There was a leaking gas pipe a dozen feet below, and the dog had noticed it.

That's a very nice story, but not at all what that book is about.

Uneducated guess: about as long as humans and our ancestors have evolved the preservation technique of needing explanations for the unknown.

I think beliefs in magic and the supernatural arise from the natural cognitive biases and illusions that humans are subject to, that lead them to see correlations between their actions and the natural world that don't exist. The most common forms of 'magic' that people believe in, almost at an instinctual level, are 'luck' and 'karma,' both of which are inherently beliefs in a metaphysical framework which affects the physical world. It's impossible to know, but there seems to be a spiritual element even to primitive cave drawings, and I wouldn't be surprised if apes held some primitive concepts like that, chimpanzees have been observed performing what some interpret as ritualistic behavior[0] which may hint at a primitive belief in "magic."

Belief in ghosts also seems to be near-universal among humans, to the point that it may be an evolutionary adapted trait[0], this would naturally lead to animist religions, which are essentially beliefs that everything has a ghost. Human psychology being what it is (and religion being in a sense the human mind turned inside out and projected upon the world,) if you believe in ghosts, and you believe in luck and karma, eventually you believe in restless spirits and wicked monsters that blight your crops and bring you nightmares and all sorts of monsters of the id, and then your religion provides rituals and spells to deal with them.

Speaking of which, here[1] is a very good lecture by Dr. Irving Finkel on the first recorded beliefs about ghosts from ancient Mesopotamia, and the magic they used.

Also, for much of human history, the only people who could read and write were priests and astrologers, elite classes who controlled the 'secret knowledge' about the seasons, signs and portents of the future and rituals regarding the dead (the word "magic" originates from an ancient Persian word for priests[2]), which would lead people to believe words had innate magical power, or at least that the spells they wrote down did.

[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/chimpanz...

[1]https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-cognitive-psyc...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNNaZ110ee4

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPNpE0X3Bkw

I would guess that the seeds were sown once humans (or our primate ancestors) were able to consciously conceive of cause and effect, and learned how one can sometimes, through one's own volition, bring about desired outcomes. From this, it does not seem an implausible leap to imagine that our environment is controlled by conscious entities, and once one is there, to seek out the language necessary to communicate one's own desires to those putative entities.

Even more so, once one realizes that you can use language to persuade other people to act in a way that advances your own interests.

It’s a bit later in development than cause and effect, all of our fellow apes have that. You are correct that it’s the misapplication of cause and effect, but it was only possible after the introduction of abstract thought.

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