Why I chose George Marshall Medical Museum: a blog by Sally Boyle

Scanning through all the placements available to me, the opportunity to work with this organisation stood out. As is evident by my degree choice, learning about history is a huge interest of mine. It’s what led us to the present day, it’s what has influenced society around us, and even on a personal level has influenced our families generation by generation. Social history is where the largest part of my interest lies, so learning of birthing stories from the women of Worcester seemed fascinating to me. To learn of the bigger picture, we must look at the individual stories, each as important as one another. Moreover, female history often seems to be sidestepped in favour of male history, when in reality women have shown as much courage and strength as men throughout history.

Sales, marketing, and the like isn’t something I could necessarily see myself in. Though circumstances have changed due to covid-19, sitting behind a desk with no human interaction didn’t really seem greatly appealing to me. I’d much rather reach out to others, be social, make connections with other groups and see how we can all work collaboratively to reach common goals. Additionally, I feel it’s important to make efforts to improve communities, and I’m hoping to contribute towards this if funding for this project goes ahead.

Through this project, I hope to help connect the museum to groups from in and around Worcester. This includes from medical fields, pregnancy groups, mum and baby groups, religious groups and diverse ethnic communities. Not only do I want to share their stories to connect women to one another and highlight their solidarity, but also celebrate their differences and what makes each person and their own child birth story unique. I hope that hearing of other mothers difficulties but most importantly joys will empower women to feel in control of their own birth. Hearing of others could be reassuring, help women make their own choices instead of just listening to medical advice and hopefully inspire social charge. This is why I am working on trying to drum up interest for the project. Having created a list of organisations I could contact, I will soon be working on getting in touch with them to ask if they feel this project could benefit the women in their communities. From this, we will be able to see if the project can go ahead.

Hope to keep you all updated on what happens next!

Birthing Stories: Home Births in Twentieth-century Worcestershire

Images of midwives sterilising medical instruments in a fireplace seldom come to mind when we think of giving birth nowadays. Instead, we imagine white coats, heart monitors, and hospital gowns. Yet, even into the late twentieth century, giving birth at home in the UK was often encouraged. Once again, as part of the ‘Birthing Stories’ project, I have been doing some digging into the selection of oral histories held by the George Marshall Medical Museum, which reveal how common home births were in the mid twentieth century. In this blog post, I shall be sharing some interesting home birthing stories from Worcestershire residents.

Birth was becoming more medicalised after 1950, but a lot of births were still at home. Even in the 1960s, 33% of women gave birth at home in the UK, in comparison to 0.9% between 1985 and 1988. Worcestershire resident Anne Smith had all of her children at home, with her first child born in 1958. Even after she suffered a miscarriage, a doctor at Ronkswood hospital still said she would be alright to give birth to her next baby at home:

“I said um, “I’d like to have this one at home if I may?” And er he said, “Well if… that what you’d like,” he said “I’m sure it’ll be alright.” So I had the next one with no problem you see so… and the next one after that (chuckles)”

— Anne Smith (12/11/2001)

The mindset of this doctor is certainly not unusual for the time. Indeed, Dr Jennings, a GP in Worcestershire, remarked that in the 1960s, there was no guarantee that a mother would be able to give birth in hospital:

“Even a firs-, mother having a first baby couldn’t be guaranteed to have a bed and be delivered in a hospital, unless she had adequate social grounds as to why it wasn’t fit for her to have it at home”

— Dr David Jennings (11/04/2002)

For some women, however, home births were very empowering. The mother could be surrounded by friends, family and a familiar atmosphere. Helen Shirley Brice tells us that she enjoyed giving birth at home in the mid-1960s, and preferred it to a hospital birth because she could quickly return to normality:

“Within about five or six days [of the birth] I was just walking around the house as though, you know, I was supposed to be there. Not like staying in hospital for ten days and coming home because that I think, staying in hospital, took a lot of confidence out of you […] I think this is one of the lovely things about having a baby at home because you’re amidst the whole family and again my husband was able to be at the birth”

— Helen Shirley Brice (18/10/2001)

Interestingly, fathers were not encouraged to be present for hospital births until the 1970s. A home birth could therefore be a preferred option for the mother, given that she could be joined by her partner. Indeed, birth traditionally has a very social emphasis (for more information, see Adrian Wilson, Ritual and Conflict: the Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England, (London, 2016)). Historically, when a pregnant woman entered confinement, she would be joined by other women who would assist with the birth. A home birth thus seems to hark back to this tradition, with the mother being supported by loved ones.

Yet, there were inevitably risks associated with home births. Eileen Roberts became pregnant in the 1960s and was not allowed to give birth in hospital under the NHS because she had no problems during her pregnancy. She was, however, very scared to give birth at home because her mother had lost two babies in the past. So, she paid three times her husband’s salary to have her baby privately at South Bank hospital:

“And in those days, strange as it may seem you weren’t allowed to go into hospital to have your first child if there were no problems, you only went into hospital if you had problems. [..] I was rather concerned about this because my mother had lost two babies before I survived.”

— Eileen Roberts (19/03/2002)

From a professional standpoint, Dr David Lees remembers performing a lot of home deliveries. He remarks that giving birth at home could be wonderful, but that if things go wrong, it could be disastrous. In particular, he remembers being present for a delivery with one 40-watt bulb in the room.

“Things are unpredictable in obstetrics and I would hate to go back to er delivering babies in the home”

— Dr David Lees (06/03/2002)

In Worcester, if something went wrong during a home birth, a ‘flying squad’ of consultants would be called to assist the midwife. Dr David Lees remembers that because there was no ambulance, all the obstetrics equipment went in the back of the consultant’s car:

“There was no dedicated ambulance or van even, it all had to go into the boot of the consultants car […] All the obstetric instruments, sterilised instruments, and erm the blood and fluids that were needed for intravenous use. Giving sets, the lot. So you knew this was going to take you half an hour to get to the patient and if you were on the other end and a woman was bleeding or she had a retained placenta or something you were absolutely terrified.”

— Dr David Lees (06/03/2002)

Home births are still an option given to pregnant women. Nevertheless, home births today tend to be opted for by wealthier women who live in more comfortable homes, which could be why the mortality rates are now generally the same for home and hospital births. Yet, as is evident in the oral histories, until the late twentieth century, women were often not given the option to give birth in hospital. It could thus be said that women were not as well informed about the dangers of home births as mothers are today. Perhaps the conclusion here is that it is irrelevant if a woman opts to give birth at home, in hospital, or in a birthing centre. Instead, what matters is that she has been given all the options and information she needs and deserves.

- Molly Schoenfeld, Research Assistant for ‘Birthing Stories’ project

Birthing Stories: A Brief History of Oral History

“All history was at first oral”

— Samuel Johnson, 1773

Much of the history we see on paper was spoken before it was written. Originally, the study of history was not about essays, bibliographies and footnotes, but instead songs, family tales and fireside stories. The Ancient Greek myths, the legend of King Arthur and even nursery rhymes are all believed to have originated from oral tradition.

Within historical study, the likes of Thucydides, Bede and Samuel Johnson all used eyewitness accounts of events. Yet, this practice was overtaken by a lengthy period of western historiography based almost entirely on written sources. This predominantly document-based study lasted until the twentieth century, when historians began to make use of technology and record oral histories using tape recorders.

Oral histories have subsequently been used for the study of a wide range of topics, including local dialects and traditions, BAME histories, and the history of medicine, which brings us to this very exciting ‘Birthing Stories’ project in which I have been researching more about the history of giving birth and obstetrics in Worcestershire (take a look at the previous blog if you wish to know a bit more about my role in the project).

Over the past two weeks, I have been delving into the ‘Medicine in Worcester’ collection of transcribed oral histories, which were recorded in the early 2000s for George Marshall Medical Museum. These interviews feature many locals and healthcare staff from Worcestershire who discuss topics ranging from the NHS to wartime Worcester. For the purposes of this project, I am very interested in the discussion of giving birth and obstetrics.

I find it fascinating to see people’s stories in their original form, not obscured by statistics or analysis. In the transcripts, every word, cough and ring of the doorbell is documented to ensure accuracy, which at times presents challenging reading!

Just to give a taste of the treasures in the oral histories, here is a story of a woman giving birth in Worcestershire in around 1967. She had no friends to look after her other children, so she decided to give birth at home. The night before her due date, she got up in the middle of the night, did some housework and fixed the Christmas tree to distract herself. She remembers thinking “I think I have time to make steak and kidney pie” and cooked it just before the midwife arrived! In my next blog, I will be exploring in more depth the experience of giving birth at home in Worcestershire.

“I knew I was going to have the baby next morning so I got up in the middle of the night and I did a bit of housework and sat down and I did a bit of tidying round I put the Christmas tree right, I busied myself through the night which made the time go […] much quicker, rather than lying somewhere and counting the ceiling tiles or the stripes on the wall, I was doing something and I found that was a very much better at least for me. […] Then the midwife came, and I remember trying to think “I think I have time to make steak and kidney pie […] And it was all cooking and she arrived... she left at ten past ten, in the morning, and at twenty past ten I knew I was going to have this baby fairly quickly so at twenty past ten I went upstairs she arrived five minutes later and our third child Denise was born at twenty to eleven”

— R.2001.001.0042, 19/03/2002

This snippet from an oral history is just one example of all the colourful, personal stories to be found in these recordings, and as part of the ‘Birthing Stories’ project, the George Marshall Medical Museum is very keen to collect more oral histories about the experience of giving birth in Worcestershire, and will be seeking funding, soon.

Oral history has the power to democratise history, as it does not present a ‘top-bottom’ narrative of history which typically depends on government papers and elite affairs. Oral history instead brings to light the stories of locals and marginalised groups, which may otherwise be neglected in the historical record. With the digital age upon us, recording oral histories has never been easier, with recording equipment readily available on our phones and laptops (rather than having to lug a heavy tape recorder around!).

If you are interested in finding out more about the ‘Birthing Stories’ project, please contact the George Marshall Medical Museum Curator, Louise Price, via email: louise.price10@nhs.net

- Molly Schoenfeld, Research Assistant for ‘Birthing Stories’ project

Welcome to the E-Team!

We’re very pleased to welcome Molly to the team (at least remotely). Molly is a History student at University of Birmingham and is joining us for her remote work placement until her academic term starts in Autumn 2020. Along with Sally (who we introduced earlier in the week), Molly will be assisting with research for our hopeful Birthing Stories project next year, and will be delving into our oral histories and archive collections, specifically. Enough from us, here’s a word from Molly:

““My name is Molly and I am going into the second year of my History undergraduate degree at the University of Birmingham.

I really enjoy archival research, given my History degree and previous work experience in archives, and am therefore very enthusiastic about this research placement. Because of my editor position at my university student newspaper, I am also delighted to have the opportunity to share my research through posts and blogs.

During this placement, I am very much looking forward to delving into online archives and learning more about the history of birth and obstetrics in Worcestershire. By listening to oral histories and reading transcribed interviews, I aim to help make accessible online resources on this topic, both as a historical record and also as a tool for the future of medicine. Learning about history orally is a fascinating and rare method of research, allowing personal experiences to be heard in their original form - I cannot wait to share my findings.””

— Molly Schoenfeld