From conception to birth in Anglo-Saxon England

In discussing this text and one on sex determination before birth, Mitchell remarks that it 'is not possible to say how widely they were known or how seriously they were taken'.45 I would agree that it is hard to be sure how widely the text under discussion was known. The implication of Mitchell's remark is that it was not well known, and this may indeed be true. The text exists in only one manuscript and it is not referred to, as far as I know, in any other extant text from Anglo-Saxon England. However, this has to be seen in the context of there being, as noted above, rather little known of the medical care of Anglo-Saxon women in general and, in particular, of the chapter on women's ailments being missing from Bald's Leechbook. The second part of Mitchell's remark quoted above seems to imply that he considered the present text not to have been taken very seriously. This resonates with older, now largely outdated, views of Anglo-Saxon medicine in general. Grattan and Singer, for example, describe this medicine as based very little 'on anything that we may reasonably describe as experience' and said that it 'dwells in the barbarian world of magic'.46 By contrast, Cameron, as quoted above, considers at least one Anglo-Saxon physician to have held a mostly rational approach.47 As I have suggested in this paper, in my view the text under discussion is at least to some extent rational not magical. That is, it seems to be based on observation both of pregnant women and of those who had miscarried, as well as on discussion with pregnant women. It may be that written sources, now lost, were also used. The Bible and Church teaching also seem to have played a part in informing the description. Today we have all the advantages of medical science, in this context of embryology in particular, and also of medical diagnostic equipment. In the case of foetal development, the ultrasound scan has become a most useful, not to say essential, tool. It is easy to forget that this scan was only developed for obstetric use a generation ago, in the 1960s, and was not in common use until the 1970s. With the benefit of modern medical knowledge, and of the actual images obtained from ultrasound scans, it is easy for us to be patronizing about the inaccuracies of the Anglo-Saxon description of foetal development. Perhaps we should instead give credit to the parts of the Old English text that are accurate, and to the parts that are clearly explicable in the light of the only knowledge likely to have been available at the time.