‘Drawing aside the curtain’: natural childbirth on screen in 1950s Britain

Abstract

Abstract. This article recovers the importance of film, and its relations to other media, in communicating the philosophies and methods of 'natural childbirth' in the post-war period. It focuses on an educational film made in South Africa around 1950 by controversial British physician Grantly Dick-Read, who had achieved international fame with bestselling books arguing that relaxation and education, not drugs, were the keys to freeing women from pain in childbirth. But he soon came to regard the 'vivid' medium of film as a more effective means of disseminating the 'truth of [his] mission' to audiences who might never have read his books. I reconstruct the history of a film that played a vital role in teaching Dick-Read's method to both the medical profession and the first generation of Western women to express their dissatisfaction with highly drugged, hospitalized maternity care. The article explains why advocates of natural childbirth such as Dick-Read became convinced of the value of film as a tool for recruiting supporters and discrediting rivals. Along the way, it offers insight into the British medical film industry and the challenges associated with producing, distributing and screening a depiction of birth considered unusually graphic for the time.Graphic childbirth scenes are familiar to present-day viewers of reality television, commonplace in school sex education and ubiquitous in prenatal preparation classes. 1 This is far from being a recent phenomenon: the screen has served as a vehicle for communicating ideas about maternity since the earliest days of cinema and television. Filmmakers have used 'clinical' images of the birth process to push the frontiers of cinematic expression, challenging distributors', censors' and viewers' understandings of aesthetics, reality and genre. Childbirth films played a crucial role in both early twentieth-century exploitation cinema and experimental television in the 1950s, prompting considerable debate

Laktasyonu Arttıran Yöntemler: Hipnoemzirme

“…Hipnoz, Amerikan Hekimler Birliği tarafından 1957'de çoklu fiziksel ve duygusal şikayetlerin üstesinden gelmek için kullanışlı bir terapi olarak kabul edilmiştir (Sari ve Budihastuti, 2017). Hipnoz, 1890'lı yıllarda Dr. Grantley Dick Read "korkusuz doğum" adı verilen bir programla gündeme getirip, uygulamıştır (Gaılanı, 2017). Bu keşif daha sonra Marie Mongan tarafından devam etmiştir.…”

Fear of Childbirth during Pregnancy and Birth Planning

“…Preparation for childbirth was particularly emphasised by Grantly Dick-Read, and the popular "fear-tension-pain" triad was named after him. He argued that it was precisely the preparation for childbirth that allowed for the elimination of that triad during labour [10].…”