"How to Give Birth to a Rabbit"

from The Awl

Birthing Fake Monsters in Early Modern Germany

The following are excerpts from Alison Rowlands, "Monstrous Deception: Midwifery, Fraud, and Gender in Early Modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber" in Gender in Early Modern History, ed. Ulinka Rublack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 71-101:

"Examples of the creatures it was thought possible a woman could give birth to in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included a frog, a calf, a lobster and a monkey."

"[The midwife] referred to an unmarried woman from the city of Esslingen who had managed to convince people that her stomach was full of snakes, with the implication that she too had received gifts from onlookers as a result of her mysterious condition"
--
"The plan worked like this: Seitterin's dog had recently given birth to puppies, one of which had died and partially decomposed. Mullerin took its body home with her, fashioned it into something Seitterin later described as 'in the likelness of a little pig', then smuggled it back into Seitterin's room hidden in her basket. She instructed Seitterin to hold the manufactured monstrosity between her legs in front of the opening to her vagina and pretend to be in the throes of childbirth. She was them to summon her female neighbours and, on their arrival, to let the monstrosity fall from between her legs so that they would assume she had just given birth to it"
...
"Mullerin seems to have just pulled the head off the already half-decomposed puppy for the first birth, and skinned, disembowelled and chopped the heads off the next two puppies for births two and three."


Gross! And so wrong!

Quotes from "Midwifery, Obstetrics, and the Rise of Gynaecology"

"Waldung picked up on Dubois's comment that 'Woman abounds with a great quantity of blood'."

"They believed that, if menstruation did not occur, then t he surplus blood would come out through another orifice, or continue to build up in the body, putting pressure on different organs, until disease or even death resulted."

"Mercado...[helped] a virgin who, through no fault of her own, has a wide vaginal opening."

"Common to many [treatises on women] was the idea that women are wetter than men, and that this is turn results from the flesh throughout their bodies being of a softer and more spongy texture, absorbing more fluid from their diet. Glands 16 explains that women's bodies retain moisture because they are loose-textured, spongy, and like wool."

Obscenity in 16th- and 17th-century France

Just read a fantastic article by Valerie Worth-Stylianou, "The Definition of Obscene Material 1570-1615: Three Medical Treatises Held to Account," EMF: Studies in Early Modern France 14 (2010): 148-167.