Miscarriage, False Conceptions, and Other Lumps: Women’s Pregnancy Loss in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Summary Histories of early modern medicine and generation have tended to overlook the place that miscarriage, infertility, false conception and uterine diseases had in medical knowledge and women’s lives. By exploring English medical literature, casebooks, and letters, the study argues that a wide range of physical events, including miscarriage and false conception or mola, were experienced by women as a pregnancy, and then as the ‘loss of pregnancy’, or the loss of a potential infant. Early modern women often felt distress, grief and confusion at such losses, and medical practitioners formulated specific responses or treatments to these women’s experiences of losses. Considering miscarriage, false conception and uterine masses through the concept of ‘pregnancy loss’ challenges current narratives about generation. It shows that at this time a variety of gestational experiences, such as non-foetal gravidities and miscarriage formed part of ‘generation’, alongside the conception and birth of living infants.