Valerie Worth discusses early modern childbirth on BBC Radio 4

Professor Valerie Worth, Fellow Emerita of Trinity College, was featured on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ this week, discussing practices and beliefs around pregnancy, childbirth, and infertility from the early modern period through to today. Speaking alongside Dr Elma Brenner, Research Development Lead at the Wellcome Library, Professor Worth explored how women’s bodily experiences can be recovered from early modern writings and illustrations, and discussed some of the debates over the role of midwives, birthing positions, and tangible evidence of personal beliefs at a time of religious upheaval.

The programme is available as a podcast, which you can listen to here [clip starts at 46:33].

Professor Worth has published extensively on medical treatises concerning women’s health from c.1500–1700, including www.birthingtales.org, a project on “Birthing Tales in French Medical Works, 1500–1650”. She held a Mellon–TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellowship through The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, supporting her collaboration with the libraries of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and the Royal College of Midwives on the history of childbirth. She also served as a member of the RCOG’s “Women’s Voices” panel.

She currently holds a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for her forthcoming monograph, Women & Translation in Early Modern France, which includes a chapter on translations of medical works dedicated to women.