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Childbirth   /tʃˈaɪldbˌərθ/   Listen
Childbirth

noun
1.
The parturition process in human beings; having a baby; the process of giving birth to a child.  Synonyms: accouchement, childbearing, vaginal birth.



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"Childbirth" Quotes from Famous Books



... who creates another being—not in the fleeting moment of a voluptuous contact, but by the organic and psychical sacrifices of pregnancy, childbirth and giving suck—cannot preserve for herself as much strength, physical and mental, as man whose only function in the reproduction of the species is ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... introduction and improvement of instrumental and induced deliveries, many of these women are enabled to survive, with the necessary consequence that their daughters will in many cases have a similarly narrow pelvis, and experience similar difficulty in childbirth. The percentage of deliveries in which instrumental aid is necessary is thus increasing from generation to generation, and is likely to continue to increase for some time. In other words, natural selection, because of man's interference, can no longer maintain the width of woman's pelvis, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... been great friendship between them. It had once happened, namely, that Stein, on his voyage from Iceland with his own vessel, had come to Giske from sea, and had anchored at the island. At that time Ragnhild was in the pains of childbirth, and very ill, and there was no priest on the island, or in the neighbourhood of it. There came a message to the merchant-vessel to inquire if, by chance, there was a priest on board. There happened to be a priest in the vessel, who was called Bard; but he ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson

... uses of hypnosis are in childbirth and for intractable pain of cancer or some other incurable diseases. Although patients usually start with hetero-hypnosis, they are put on self-hypnosis as soon as possible, and there are many cases of women waiting too long and having their babies at home painlessly through self-hypnosis. ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers

... father dwelt at Delagoa Bay, and who was beautiful, ah! beautiful. Then he settled on the banks of the Zambesi and became a trader, building the house where he is now, or rather where its ruins are. Here his wife died in childbirth; yes, she died in my arms, and it was I who reared her daughter Juanna, tending her from ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... died in childbirth, and if a medical man had been available she would have lived. However, I suppose landscape-painters are entitled to ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... year. Claremont was assigned to the young couple as their future residence. Eight days after the marriage a sad event broke in on the marriage rejoicings; the bride's sister, Princess William of Wurtemberg, died in childbirth at the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... there lived at Calb, in the Werder, an aged lady of the house of Alvensleben, who feared God, was gracious to the people, and willingly disposed to render any one a service: especially she did assist the burgesses' wives in difficult travail of childbirth, and was, in such cases, of all desired and highly esteemed. Now, therefore, there did ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... rather die strong than live weak. And Juba—why should she have this pride for him? For she felt pride, pangs as real as the pangs of childbirth. There are different kinds of pride, but the worst kind of pride is pride in strength, pride in power. And she knew that was what she felt. She was sinning with full knowledge and she could not ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown

... vanguard and rearguard, the rest of the party walked: Varnis, carrying her baby on her back, and Dorita, carrying a baby and leading two other children. The baby on her back had cost the life of Kyna in childbirth; one of the others had been left motherless when Eldra had been killed by ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper

... of countries so unfortunate as not to know the blessings of national representation, and which are, therefore, ignorant by what intestinal convulsions, what Brutus-like sacrifices, a little town gives birth to a deputy. Majestic but natural spectacle, which may, indeed, be compared with that of childbirth,—the same throes, the same impurities, the same lacerations, the same ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... much commerce with the Queen's party, and had learnt from some of the garrison of Dunfermline that the child on board the lost ship was the offspring of this same Hepburn, and of one of Queen Mary's many namesake kindred, who had died in childbirth at Lochleven. And now Langston professed bitterly to regret what he had done when, in his disguise at Buxton, he had made known to some of Mary's suite that the supposed Cicely Talbot was of their country and kindred. She had been immediately ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... conversation upon this episode. Ella seemed to be only too frequently in a sad and listless mood, which might almost have been called pining. The time was approaching when she would have to undergo the stress of childbirth for a fourth time, and that apparently did not ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... miserably about her, remembered how at every crisis of her life the old house had spoken to her of the line of submissive wives and mothers which lay back of her, and had tamed her to a happy resignation in the common fate of women. On her mother's bed she had borne the agony of childbirth without a murmur, she whose strong young body had never known pain of any kind. She had been a joyful prisoner to her little children, she who had always roamed so foot-free in her girlhood, and with a patience ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... Earth," the latter being bestowed upon her, says Duran, because she was believed to be the cause of earthquakes. Her general functions were those of a genius of fertility, extending both to the vegetable and the animal world. Thus, she was the patroness of the native midwives and of women in childbirth (Sahagun). Her chief temple at Tepeyacac was one of the most renowned in ancient Mexico, and it was a felicitous idea of the early missionaries to have "Our Lady of Guadalupe" make her appearance on the immediate site of this ancient ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various

... House of God in which I take such delight, in looking down her aisles and beholding her sanctuaries and the table of the Lord? No. And can I forsake taking part in the service of Thanksgiving of women after childbirth when mine own wife has been delivered ten times? No. And can I leave off waiting on the congregation of the Lord which you well know, Sir, is my delight? No. And can I forsake the Table of the Lord at which I have feasted I suppose some thirty times? No. And, dear Sir, can I ever forsake you ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... years ago. He never recognised Miss Pansy, nor, knowing what he was about, would have anything to say to her; and there was no reason why he should. Osmond did, and that was better; though he had to fit on afterwards the whole rigmarole of his own wife's having died in childbirth, and of his having, in grief and horror, banished the little girl from his sight for as long as possible before taking her home from nurse. His wife had really died, you know, of quite another matter ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... styptics, narcotics, emetics, and all that the most profound M.D. could prescribe. With this "multum in parvo" stock-in-trade the Faky receives his patients. No. 1 arrives, a barren woman who requests some medicine that will promote the blessing of childbirth. No. 2, a man who was strong in his youth, but from excessive dissipation has become useless. No. 3, a man deformed from his birth, who wishes to become straight as other men. No. 4, a blind child. No. 5, ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker

... Chaise, the same feeling came over him like a flood. In the night he climbed the wall, and dug up a little girl of seven years old. He tore her in half. A few days later, he opened the grave of a woman who had died in childbirth, and had lain in the grave for thirteen days. On the 16th November, he dug up an old woman of fifty, and, ripping her to pieces, rolled among the fragments. He did the same to another corpse on the 12th December. These are only a few of the numerous cases of violation ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... of bark cloth are made and worn by men and women. They are only put on after recovery from an illness by which the wearer has been laid up, including childbirth. The cape is simply a plain long narrow piece of undyed bark cloth. The corners of one end are fastened together, and the whole of that end is bunched up into a sort of hood, which is placed over the head, whilst the rest of the cloth hangs down as a narrow ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... woman to bear with greater ease the pains inherent to childbirth; her refractoriness to all kinds of variation—also that of a degenerate nature—serves to correct morbid heredity and to bring back the race, which owes its continuation to her, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... higher classes. Working women escape much of the pain their more luxurious sisters have to endure. Travellers tell us how, among the Red Indians, Negroes, South Sea Islanders and others who live more in a state of nature than we, the women suffer but little in childbirth, and return to their ordinary occupations almost immediately after the event. The adoption of a simple and natural diet, healthy exercise combined with sufficient rest and rational clothing, have been found to ensure an easy delivery as well ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... down vnto their breast These gentlewomen are exceeding fat, and the lesser their noses be, the fairer are they esteemed: they daube ouer their sweet faces with grease too shamefully: and they neuer lie in bed for their trauel of childbirth. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... must be obeyed." And what he will say in private the law will say in public. Mrs. Stone records a piteous case in which an unborn child was willed by its dying father to relatives in a foreign country in which the widowed mother suffered the pains of childbirth, that other hearts than hers might be gladdened by her dearly-bought treasure. This young woman was described as in a maze of bewilderment at the presence on the statute-book of a law so miraculously wicked. We all hope that in such laws there comes a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... to an animal about to have young, or to a woman in childbirth—which are further concessions to property and humanity. All might be done on the Sabbath, too, needful for circumcision. On the other hand, bones might not be set, nor emetics given, nor any medical or surgical operation ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... suggests that the word Fravashi may be derived from the Avestan root var, "to impregnate," and fravasi mean "birth-promotion" (p. 142). As he associates this with childbirth the possibility suggests itself whether the "birth-promoter" may not be ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... long period (nine months) elapsing between cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the subject. Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by childbirth. And, more important still, the number of virgins of a mature age in primitive societies was so very minute that the fact of their childlessness attracted no ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... down into the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came forth, as in childbirth, something alive—a vision as swift, as passing as a glimpse into the gates of Paradise; a blinding certainty of immensity, of the hugeness of the whole of which she and Ariadne were a part; of the sacredness of life, which ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... the spring to Atticus a letter from Antium, and we first hear that Tullia is dead. She had seemed to recover from childbirth; but her strength did not suffice, and she was no more.[154] A boy had been born, and was left alive. In subsequent letters we find that Cicero gives instructions concerning him, and speaks of providing for him in his will.[155] But of the child we hear nothing more, and ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... consecrated by the Pope. In 1471 Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of this fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, tempest, lightning, and hail, as well as in assisting women in childbirth; and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture of it. Even as late as 1517 Pope Leo X issued, for a consideration, tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription: 'This cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in his humanity. He who kisses it is preserved ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... can cure, and give easy childbirth. I can bring rain, and give fortune in the hunt, but of the making of evil spells ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin

... of some importance in our family at one time. You know that my mother died in childbirth, and that Henry's life as an infant was only saved by this woman's unwearied devotion. She was passionately attached to Henry, and her singular disposition and turn of mind gave her a hold upon him which ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton

... for all the benefits thou hast done unto me,' This I indeed remember, but thou forgettest; for thou art ready to slay me. Do it not, I beseech thee, by Pelops thy grandsire, and Atreus thy father, and this my mother, who travailed in childbirth of me and now travaileth again in her sorrow. And thou, O my brother, though thou art but a babe, help me. Weep with me; beseech thy father that he slay not thy sister. O my father, though he be silent, ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... another thing," said Monsieur Martener. "Successful childbirth is then one of those miracles which God sometimes allows himself, ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... consequences. Unknown to Eli this law of reciprocal honor has been all the while secretly working, and now the time has come for judgment to fall. Hophni and Phineas, the degenerate priests, fall in battle, the wife of Hophni dies in childbirth, Israel flees before her enemies, the ark of God is captured by the Philistines and the old man Eli falls backward and dies of a broken neck. Thus stark utter tragedy followed upon Eli's failure ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer

... Pedro de Segura, who was one of those who had gone thither from Manila, an extraordinary incident in connection with the image of our blessed Father Ignatius. One morning, at daybreak, he was summoned in behalf of a woman who lay in a critical condition from childbirth, and wished to confess with Father Segura. While the father was dressing himself to go, he sent for an image of our father, to whom he professed great devotion—which had been increased by the outcome of the shipwrecks which we ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson

... the house-top, to the stars, the heavens, rushed the terrible cry, wailing as wails the wolf who has lost its mate, insisting as insists one who has staked his all on one final throw, imploring as implores the mother in the last dire throes of childbirth. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... mother died in childbirth. But father is still well; in fact he must have a very strong ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... can be saved. I am also suffered to inform you that you are with child, and will produce a son, who will marry my heiress; that Sir Tristram will not live long, when you will marry again, and you will die from the effects of childbirth in your forty- seventh year." I begged from him some convincing sign or proof so that when the morning came I might rely upon it, and feel satisfied that his appearance had been real, and that it was not the phantom of ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... activity. Yet the persecution had hardly begun before difficulties were thickening round the Queen. In her passionate longing for an heir who would carry on her religious work Mary had believed herself to be with child; but in the summer of 1555 all hopes of any childbirth passed away, and the overthrow of his projects for the permanent acquisition of England to the House of Austria at once disenchanted Philip with his stay in the realm. But even had all gone well it was ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... denying themselves all but the fish and rice. The mothers weaned their puny brats on rice; they stuffed them with it till their swollen paunches made a grotesque contrast with their skinny legs. Childbirth is one of the minor incidents of Filipinia. Where is the house that doesn't swarm with babies, like the celebrated residence of the old woman in the shoe? When one of these sparrows falls, the little song that dies ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... exclaimed Sinang. "Not all who charge high prices are wise. Look at Doctor Guevara. He did not know how to aid a woman in childbirth, but after cutting off the child's head, he collected one hundred pesos from the widower. What he did know was ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... that the moon sheds upon them oppresses their faculty and disables their bodies. Besides, it is commonly said, that women brought to bed when the moon is a fortnight old, have easy labors; and for this reason I believe that Diana, which was the same with the moon, was called the goddess of childbirth. And Timotheus ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... responding to any touch. She had been nearer to him physically than any other human being, and that she had been further mentally was swamped in that thought in the hour when she was dying of the nearness.... For he had the guilty feeling of the man whose wife dies in childbirth, and though he told himself that whatever passing brute had wantonly hung the harmless dog had brought about this tragedy, that could not altogether absolve him. His poor little Phoebe—he had always known her soft heart for animals, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... the proportionate value attached to different virtues 44 Military, civic, and intellectual virtues 44 The mediaeval type 45 Modifications introduced by Protestantism 47 Bossuet and Louis XIV. 48 Persecution.—Operations at childbirth.—Usury 50 Every great religion and philosophic system produces or favours a distinct moral type 51 Variations in moral judgments 51 Complexity of moral influences of modern times.—The industrial type 53 Qualified by other influences 54 Unnecessary suffering 57 Goethe's exposition ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... another shell burst close by. They rightly dropped the body and lay flat. The only fragment which struck at all almost cut the dead man in half. Another shell later in the day killed a Kaffir woman and her husband in a back garden off the main street. Several women have died from premature childbirth ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... in their fancy and with a higher note of sincerity in their grief are the epitaphs on young mothers, dead in childbirth: Athenais of Lesbos, the swift-footed, whose cry Artemis was too busy with her woodland hounds to hear; Polyxena, wife of Archelus, not a year's wife nor a month's mother, so short was all her time; Prexo, wife of Theocritus, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... event in life. If a child, on its appearance in the world, appears to be in any way defective, its mother quietly kills it and deposits its body in the forest. If the mother dies in childbirth the child, unless someone takes pity on it and adopts it, is killed by the father, who, it may be presumed, is indisposed to take the trouble, perhaps indeed incapable of doing so, of rearing the motherless babe. That the child, in any case, immediately after ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... with regard to property, also in regard to children, the law is unjust to women. The mother has to undergo much in bringing a child to maturity—the agony of childbirth... the countless cares of tending and watching by night and day. The child becomes the darling of her heart, the image of her dreams, the great centre of her thoughts and hopes; and after all her toils, the law permits a husband to take the child permanently out of her sight, and (if he choose) ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... 550/- and one pig. It is believed by the Khasis that the evils resultant from incestuous connection are very great; the following are some of them: being struck by lightning, being killed by a tiger, dying in childbirth, &c. ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... can stay no longer; I am so great in childbirth with this jest. Sirrah, this predicable, this saucy groom, because, when I was in Cambridge, and lay in a trundlebed under my tutor, I was content, in discreet humility, to give him some place at the table; and because I invited ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... of the village had been three days in the pains of childbirth, and had endured great torments, without being eased, either by the prayers of the Brachmans, or any natural remedies. Xavier went to visit her, accompanied by one of his interpreters; "and then it was," says he, in one of his letters, "that, forgetting I was in a strange country, I began to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden

... several thousand prisoners, for which he was rewarded with the Order of Maria Therese." In a few months afterwards she became the wife of the man whom she so much admired, and from whom she was torn away not long after by the cruel hand of death. It will be remembered that she died in childbirth, and her offspring expired at the same time. The accoucheur who attended her was so much affected by the calamity, that he committed suicide some short ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow

... present at the beginning. The fever is high, pulse bounds and feels hard and strong, the face is flushed but there is little or no pain. The discharge from the womb, unless it is blocked by a clot, is foul smelling. The flow after childbirth is scanty, sometimes suppressed. The womb and ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... Your servant observed the address, sir. Oh, very sharp fellow! See how the old gentleman takes to his dog—fine little dog—what a stump of a tail! Deal of practice—expect two accouchements every hour. Hot weather for childbirth. So says I to Mrs. Perkins, 'If Mrs. Plummer is taken, or Mrs. Everat, or if old Mr. Grub has another fit, send off at once to No. 4. Medical men should be always in the way-that's my maxim. Now, sir, where do you feel ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the new church, where they had heard two splendid and edifying sermons in German and English delivered to two large audiences." (383.) October 16, 1763, he wrote: "Pastor Handschuh was called upon to bury a Reformed woman who died in childbirth; he delivered the sermon in the old Reformed church." On October 18, 1763, during the sessions of Synod, and at its request, Whitefield preached in the pulpit of Muhlenberg. In 1767 J. S. Gerock dedicated ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente

... rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew of man's morning; they ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... she was going away, I could not see too much of her; morning, noon, and night I had her. She brought her two children to me, and very proud she was of them. How it was I never noticed the marks of childbirth on her before I know not, but I never had. I spoke of that now. "I took good care you should not," said she smiling, and I recollected that when I had her by the side of the bed, when I looked at her on the sofa, it was nearly always ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... her bathe)—Ver. 483. It was the custom for women to bathe immediately after childbirth. See the Amphitryon of Plautus, l. 669, and the Note to ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... dear friend, are you experiencing the anguish and labors of childbirth? That is splendid and youthful. Those who want them ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which have no meaning and realising that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... undercut by the casual male assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)

... and her Grand Chamberlain were on their wanderings again—this time to the Tyrol, to Austria, and through Northern Italy, always inseparable and everywhere setting the tongue of scandal wagging by their indiscreet intimacy. Even the tragic death in childbirth of her only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, which put all England in mourning, seemed powerless to check her career of folly. It is true that, on hearing of it, she fell into a faint and afterwards into a kind of protracted ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... doing, like most crazy enterprises. Three years ago his wife had laboured hard in childbirth, and had had the whims of labouring women. Up in the keep of Larisa, on the windy hillside, there had been heart-searching and talk about the gods. The little olive-wood Hermes, the very private and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... nursing service. The remaining 28 percent (442 patients) could not have been cared for adequately in their own homes ... 24 percent of the patients secured no medical care. Many startling instances of unnecessary and indefensible suffering and misery were found.... Of the 113 women who went through childbirth in their homes, only one had the continuous care of a graduate nurse, and only 18 had any service whatever from graduate visiting nurses. 35 percent of the children born came into the world under unfit conditions and surroundings." ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... she mused, if she were not a lady. Literally brought up in the gutter, what advantages had she had? Her mother died in childbirth and her father, a professional gambler, abandoned the little girl to the tender mercies of an indifferent neighbor. When she was about eight years old her father was arrested. He refused to pay police blackmail, was indicted, railroaded to prison and died soon after in ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... condition. Among all primitive nations, including the ancient Hebrews, we find an elaborate code of rules in regard to the conduct and treatment of women on arriving at the age of puberty, during pregnancy and the menstrual periods, and at childbirth. Among the Cherokees the presence of a woman under any of these conditions, or even the presence of any one who has come from a house where such a woman resides, is considered to neutralize all the effects of the doctor's ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... and woodland, Maid, Who to young wives in childbirth's hour Thrice call'd, vouchsafest sovereign aid, O three-form'd power! This pine that shades my cot be thine; Here will I slay, as years come round, A youngling boar, whose tusks design The ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... woods behind the houses and farms of Wells, and approached different dwellings of the far-extended settlement at about the same time. They entered the cabin of Thomas Wells, where his wife lay in the pains of childbirth, and murdered her and her two small children. At the same time they killed Joseph Sayer, a neighbor of Wells, ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... these poisons—the Belladonna, so called, undoubtedly, in thankful acknowledgment, had great power in laying the convulsions that sometimes supervened in childbirth, and added a new danger, a new fear, to the danger and the fear of that most trying moment. A motherly hand instilled the gentle poison, casting the mother herself into a sleep, and smoothing the infant's passage, after the manner of the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... Chamberlayne; he made himself indispensable to old Vallas, and old Vallas paid him a rare good salary. He settled down in the town, and he married a town girl, one of the Corkindales, the saddlers, when he'd been here three years. Unfortunately she died in childbirth within a year of their marriage. It was very soon after that that Chamberlayne threw up his post at Vallas's, and started business as a stock-and- share broker. He'd been a saving man; he'd got a nice bit of money with his wife; he always let it be known that ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... method, to astronomy and music, it should have concluded that work, and therewith the second period of the life of its author, by drawing tight together the threads of a long and intricate argument. In effect however, it began, or, in perturbed manner, and as [144] with throes of childbirth, seemed the preparation for, an argument of an entirely new and disparate species, such as would demand a new period of life also, if it might be, for its ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... to be passing with her guards, when she also was taken with travail-pains; so she alighted in a side of the garden and there brought forth Badi'a al-Jamal. She despatched one of her women to seek food and childbirth-gear of my mother, who sent her what she sought and invited her to visit her. So she came to her with Badi'a al-Jamal and my mother suckled the child, who with her mother tarried with us in the garden two months. And before wending her ways the mother of Badi'a al-Jamal ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... had become of her child, steadily maintaining that she was not mistaken when she assured them that she had given birth to one. The midwife with great effrontery told her that the new moon was unfavourable to childbirth, and that she must wait for the wane, when it would be easier as matters ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... a cup of water, and is by her beloved in turn, but being betrothed to a noble lady, he yields her in marriage to his friend, on condition that once a year—on the anniversary of their meeting—she brings him a cup of water. The girl dies in childbirth, leaving a daughter who grows into her mother's perfect likeness, and comes to meet the king when he is hunting. Just, however, as he is about to take the cup from her hand, a second figure, in her exact likeness, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... sewing were done in the cabins. A hat and a cap were also issued to each negro old enough to go into the field, and a clasp-knife to each one above the age of the third gang. From the large purchases of Scotch rugs recorded it seems probable that these were issued on other occasions than those of childbirth. As to shoes, however, the record ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... head, sides, back, and hips, palpitation of the heart, nausea, vomiting and want of appetite, curvature of the spine, scrofula, and consumption. The health of the female lacemakers especially, is constantly and deeply undermined; complaints are universal of anaemia, difficult childbirth, and miscarriage. {192a} The same subordinate official of the Children's Employment Commission reports further that the children are very often ill-clothed and ragged, and receive insufficient food, usually only bread and tea, often no meat for months together. As to their ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... obscure foundation in her temperament. There were moments when he fell back on his old superstition (exploded by the doctor) and told himself that Violet was one of those who suffer profoundly from the shock of childbirth. And in that case she would get over it ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined by the Church, were obliged to swear to their belief in that dogma before they were permitted to teach even arithmetic or geometry; in England, the denunciation of inoculation against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against using chloroform in childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in America, the use of Catholic manuals in which ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... that not without loss of sight, or life itself, can man look upon it. The travail of nature has been transformed into the pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making [25] Dionysus, as Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out among its enemies, motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest, the legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... this sentence: "Thou shalt suffer anguish in childbirth and grievous torture. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and in the hour of travail, when thou art near to lose thy life, thou wilt confess and cry, 'Lord, Lord, save me this time, and I will never again indulge in carnal pleasure,' and yet thy desire shall ever and ever ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... childbirth, n. parturition, accouchement, childbed, lying-in, travail, labor, childbearing. Associated Words: tocology, midwife, midwifery, parturient, maieutic, layette, obstetrics, obstetrician, celation, puerperal, accoucheur, accoucheuse, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... passes in and out through the nostrils and mouth; and the Greenlanders, according to Cranz, reckon two separate souls, the breath and the shadow. "Among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use..... Their state of mind is kept up to this day among Tyrolese peasants, who can still ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... pot-boilers to keep an aged mother—well, it shows they're excellent sons, but it's no excuse for bad work. They're only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse. There's a writer I know over here who told me that his wife died in childbirth. He was in love with her and he was mad with grief, but as he sat at the bedside watching her die he found himself making mental notes of how she looked and what she said and the things he was feeling. Gentlemanly, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... peasant's dwelling. The doctor replied that he was disposed to think that cases of the ailments I spoke of were not numerous. Cancer was certainly rare. He knew that in Japan rickets, goitre and gout were all less common than in the West. He expressed the opinion that childbirth was easier than in the West. It was a delight to see the fine carriage of the women and girls astride on the high saddles of the horses.[197] Both sexes in the district wear over their kimonos blue ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... is a kind of colossal naked poetry in what Pierpont Morgan has done which I cannot but acknowledge with gratitude and hope. Though there be in it, as in all massive things, a brutality perhaps like that of the moving glaciers, like the making and boiling of coal in the earth, like death, like childbirth, like the impersonality of the sea, my imagination can never get past a kind of elemental, almost heathen poetry or heathen-god poetry in Pierpont Morgan's Blow or shock upon our world. There may be reason to doubt as to whether ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Shelley is said to have witnessed the painful spectacle. On the previous day had passed away in childbirth the Princess Charlotte. The two circumstances formed the subject of an able pamphlet, drawing a contrast between the deaths, and furnishing a description of the scene within and without the prison at Derby. "When Edward Turner (one of those transported)," says ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews

... attendant had had ten, or even five fatal cases, or three, or two even, would you, or would you not, if insuring the life of the next patient to be taken care of by that attendant, expect an extra premium over that of an average case of childbirth?" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... who played their whist at the hotel Graslin a belief that the viscount and the young wife had based certain hopes on the ill-health of the banker which were now frustrated. The great agitations which marked this period of Veronique's life, the anxieties which a first childbirth causes in every woman, and which, it is said, threatens special danger when she is past her first youth, made her friends more attentive than ever to her; they vied with each other in showing her those little kindnesses which proved how warm and ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... vegetables and fruit, especially after the fourth month, avoiding farinaceous foods as much as possible, such as wheat, peas, beans, barley, and especially fine wheaten flour. These foods contain the bony constitutents, and their avoidance tends to deossify the systems of both mother and child, and make childbirth what Nature intended it to ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... edification; coinage; diaster^; organization; nisus formativus [Lat.]; putting together &c v.; establishment; workmanship, performance; achievement &c (completion) 729. flowering, fructification; inflorescence. bringing forth &c v.; parturition, birth, birth-throe, childbirth, delivery, confinement, accouchement, travail, labor, midwifery, obstetrics; geniture^; gestation &c (maturation) 673; assimilation; evolution, development, growth; entelechy [Phil.]; fertilization, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... that this pioneer wife was rich in children, for she had little else. I do not suppose she ever knew what it was to have a comfortable well-aired bedroom, even in childbirth. She was practical and a good manager, and she needed to be, for her husband was as weirdly unworldly as a farmer could be. He was indeed a sad husbandman. Only the splendid abundance of the soil and the manual skill of his sons, united to the good management of his wife, kept his family fed ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... the working classes becoming too soft. The molten iron, the flaming mine, the whirling machine, the engulfing sea, and hunger always at the door take care of that. Every working man lives in perpetual danger. Compared to him, and compared to any woman in childbirth, a soldier is secure, even under fire. The daily peril, the daily toil, the fear for the daily bread harden most working men and women enough, and for that very reason we should welcome the fine suggestion of Professor William James—his last great service—that the rich and highly educated ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... During two pregnancies the tendency to constipation was aggravated by the weight of the fetus resting on an already sluggish bowel, and the discomfort of straining to pass my first hard bowel movement after childbirth with a torn ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... generally shown some little indulgence for three or four weeks previous to childbirth; they are at such times not often punished if they do not finish the task assigned them; it is, in some cases, passed over with a severe reprimand, and sometimes without any notice being taken of it. They ate generally allowed four weeks after the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Pare also made discoveries that need not be detailed here. Until his time it was almost universal for women to be attended in childbirth only by midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was the prejudice on this point that women were known to die of abdominal tumors rather than allow male physicians to examine them. The admission of men to the profession of midwife marked a ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... of his big hands under her back, and now he drew her toward him, bending over to kiss her stomach through the covers, touched by a rough man's compassion for the suffering of a woman in childbirth. He inquired if he was hurting her. Gervaise felt very happy, and answered him that it didn't hurt any more at all. She was only worried about getting up as soon as possible, because there was no time to lie about now. He assured her that he'd be responsible ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... that a pregnant woman must eat for two. The mothers have generally obeyed this dictum. The result is that women suffer greatly during pregnancy and at childbirth. The morning sickness, the aching back, the headache, the swollen legs and all of the discomforts and diseases from which civilized woman suffers during this period are mostly due to improper eating. Pregnancy and childbirth ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge fundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex and childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but always outside of it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question of killing people, but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them born. A Eugenist might ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... to the souls of ancestors appear to be always temporal benefits, such as victory over enemies and plenty of food; prayers for the promotion of moral virtue are seemingly unknown. For example, if a woman laboured hard in childbirth, she was thought to be bewitched, and prayers would be offered to the spirits of dead ancestors to counteract the spell. Again, young men are instructed by their elders in the useful art of cursing the enemies of the tribe; and among a rich variety of imprecations an old man will invoke ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... a fright, a cold sweat all over her body. Having awakened her husband, she told him what she had dreamed. At that moment she was seized with the pains of childbirth. Li Ching withdrew to an adjoining room, uneasy at what seemed to be inauspicious omens. A little later two servants ran to him, crying out: "Your wife has given birth ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... to bed of a son, but it was doubtful if she would survive, despite the charms hung upon the bedpost to counteract the nefarious designs of Lilith, the wicked first wife of Adam, and of the Not-Good Ones who hover about women in childbirth. So Moses was sent for, post-haste, to intercede with the Almighty. His piety, it was felt, would command attention. For an average of three hundred and sixty-two days a year Moses was a miserable worm, a nonentity, but on the other three, when death threatened ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... welled warm from his wound Agamemnon went about attacking the ranks of the enemy with spear and sword and with great handfuls of stone, but when the blood had ceased to flow and the wound grew dry, the pain became great. As the sharp pangs which the Eilithuiae, goddesses of childbirth, daughters of Juno and dispensers of cruel pain, send upon a woman when she is in labour—even so sharp were the pangs of the son of Atreus. He sprang on to his chariot, and bade his charioteer drive ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... decay and restorations, a whole literature has risen up, Goethe's pensive sketch of its sad fortunes being far the best. The death in childbirth of the Duchess Beatrice was followed in Ludovico by one of those paroxysms of religious feeling which in him were constitutional. The low, gloomy Dominican church of Saint Mary of the Graces had been the favourite shrine of Beatrice. She had spent her last days there, full of sinister presentiments; ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... Brinton have much to say of the American earth-goddesses, Toci, "our mother," and goddess of childbirth among the ancient Mexicans (509. 494); the Peruvian Pachamama, "mother-earth," the mother of men (509. 369); the "earth-mother" of the Caribs, who through earthquakes manifests her animation and cheerfulness to her children, the Indians, who forthwith imitate her in joyous dances ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... physicians, but not to his own; for he declared that he should die when his illness attacked him, and so he passed away. Some persons who took refuge from external danger, under the protection of the Blessed, our fathers Ignatius and Xavier, were preserved alive. To three women Ignatius granted easy childbirth; and one Basque they relieved of toothache, when he prayed to them. Xavier came to the aid of a Spanish commander of a battalion of soldiers, who was near to death; and prolonged his life in return for two wax candles ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various

... come at last. It was evening. He must run for the midwife. And while his wife suffered all the pangs of childbirth, he had to go down into the hall ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... fair, The guardian of the groves and hills, Who hears the girls in their despair Cry out in childbirth's cruel ills, And saves them from the Stygian flow! Let the pine-tree my cottage near Be sacred to thee evermore, That I may give to it each year With joy the life-blood of the boar, Now ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field

... the consideration of her own problem and ambition, and she was too honourable to his interests, and too devoted to him in his interests, to bother him with hers. But, more significantly to her feelings than that, he was also too immersed to offer her, in her ordeal of childbirth, the sympathy and the anxiety that, unengrossed, he would have shown. It was there, profound and loving, beneath the surface; but his work came first. He was a man, capable of detachment, permitted by convention to practise ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... spirit someone set light to the urn of frankincense, for it was the evening of Thursday; and as the thick smoke curled upwards towards Afiza, she trembled and gasped out: 'This is my house; and this woman hath been delivered on the spot where I died in childbirth five years ago! I will never cease troubling her, for she hath forgotten even to burn a little 'loban' (frankincense) for the repose of my spirit.' So saying my wife fell senseless on the ground and remained motionless for thirty minutes until the spirit had fled. And, Saheb, from that ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... by Moses to the Jews, to insinuate both to us and to them, that by the sin of Adam man is conceived and born in sin, and obnoxious to his wrath, ordained that a woman, after childbirth, should continue for a certain time in a state which that law calls unclean; during which she was not to appear in public, nor presume to touch any thing consecrated to God.[1] This term was of forty days upon the birth of a son, and the time was double ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... Mercury-heritage. Next, the "History and Miracles of St. Michael" opens with a rollicking dialogue in verse between the archangel and the devil concerning a soul; it ends with a goodly list, in twenty-five verses, of the miracles performed by the angel, such as helping women in childbirth, curing the blind, and other wonders that differ nothing from those wrought by humbler earthly saints. Lastly, the "Novena in Onore di S. Michele Arcangelo," printed in 1910 (third edition) with ecclesiastical approval, has the following noteworthy ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas



Words linked to "Childbirth" :   alternative birth, alternative birthing, Bradley method of childbirth, parturition, accouchement, delivery, birthing, active birth, birth, giving birth, obstetrical delivery



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