On the Mortality of Childbed and Maternity Hospitals

1870

Truby King Collection WQ 27 DW55

Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black

‘The normal woman is never safer, healthier, happier, or more uplifted than during pregnancy’ – so said Truby King in the early 1900s. He believed that the success of the nation and the ‘destiny of the race’ lay firmly at the feet of the prospective mother. He advised pregnant women to get plenty of fresh air, to walk every day, and to eat a nutritious diet in order to produce healthy, viable children who could then defend and further the ideals of the British Empire. James Matthews Duncan (1826-90), a Scottish doctor and obstetrician, outlines in his On the Mortality of Childbed and Maternity Hospitals the difficulties and perils of successfully giving birth to a healthy baby.