Ian Mortimer in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England likens childbirth to ‘Russian roulette played with a fifty-barrelled gun’. Nearly a quarter of women did not survive their pregnancies and it is estimated that over ten per cent of babies were stillborn. A further one in six would not make it past their first birthday, a statistic that actually worsened among the poor in the unbridled development of industrial cities in the nineteenth century.
