Medical Compromise and Its Limits: Religious Concerns and the Postmortem Caesarean Section in Nineteenth-Century Belgium

Beyond Narratives of Conflict. Modern Medicine, Reproduction and Catholicism in Contemporary Historiography*

“…Conversely, as recent research on the Belgian case has shown, doctors who identified as Liberals were often ready to integrate Catholic rituals into their medical practice, such as performing an intrauterine baptism in cases of difficult birth. 28 It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that things changed and positions on both sides of the ideological spectrum hardened. A transnational revitalisation of Catholic devotion and sociability took place and the culture wars (public tensions on the place of religion in a modern polity) inspired Catholics to mobilise, often around a papalist agenda.…”

Mining Medical Journals: Religion and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine.

“…Our text-mining operations in AntConc have helped to identify large debates about difficult births in the 1840s and 1850s. These debates focused on procedures to baptize the unborn in the uterus on the one hand, and on the morality of obstetric interventions ending in the death of the fetus on the other hand (Gijbels 2019;Gijbels 2020). Central to the latter discussion was the question of whether or not physicians could give priority to the life of a woman when it was impossible to save both her life and the life of her unborn child.…”