Arm, ledig, schwanger

The Medical and Pharmaceutical History Collection at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel houses a display cabinet with 31 female pelvic bones. The pelvises were removed between 1840 and 1888 from the bodies of women whose births caused particular complications due to their pelvic shape and who died in the Kiel maternity hospital. Only the 31 pelvises with the medical records are still preserved from them and allow the authors of this book to trace the lives and deaths of these women.

King Christian VII of Denmark had endowed an academic midwifery school and a birthing house at Kiel University in 1805, from which the Kiel Maternity Hospital grew. In doing so, he was following a general trend: while pregnancy and childbirth had been in the hands of women alone since time immemorial, in the 18th century male physicians began to become more and more active in this field.

Ibrahim Alkatout and Christian Hoffarth explain the social and legal conditions under which single pregnant women operated, telling a history of obstetrics from the 19th century onwards. Since then, innovative examination procedures have been developed and many medical discoveries have been made that have significantly improved the circumstances for expectant mothers. This long road to today’s gynaecological standards of the western industrial nations began in institutions like the Kiel maternity hospital and with women like Dorothea, Magdalena, Magdalena, Margretha, Friederica, Engel, Louise, Wiebke, Greten, Catharina, Anna, Adele, Katharina and Maria.