Galloway Archive: Rosengarten
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Rosengarten is a collation of words, images and ideas derived from obstetric implements: the medical machinery used in difficult labours to extricate mothers from babies and, with luck, pull both through intact.
It seems almost redundant to explain why that would be interesting. Human beings are sympathetic animals. If the precision tools and skills of medicine, designed to deal near-unfathomable limits of distress, are intriguing (and they are), by rights, the tools of birthing should hold a very particular place in our empathies and our curiosity. Add to this the fact that these particular implements are in general entirely hidden from public view: covered till the last moment, most especially from those upon whom they will be immediately used, the processes of the labour room have developed a dark mystique.
Anecdotes of labour itself are in no short supply: mothers, attendant fathers, midwives and doctors can each supply a homegrown, set. Some are horror stories, some comedies, some are powerfully moving: all, however, seem confined to the area of personal anecdote and are largely unrecorded as art or anything else. The implements without which these stories, and their conclusions, would largely not exist appear in tales, if at all, as glimpses, imaginings, mere names. In some antenatal classes, discussion of obstetric contraptions is not only discouraged, but also disapproved as harmful. True, one set of obstetrical implements are high-profiled in the David Cronenberg film "Dead Ringers", but these are no more than a sinister set of fakes deliberately intended to crank up the morbid dysfunction of the film's leading men. Three hundred and forty years after the Chamberlen brothers, the first to use forceps commercially in Europe, hid their new-fangled contraption in an absurdly huge wooden chest against the prying gaze of "outsiders", the obstetrician's armamentarium is still something of a covered box.
The implements themselves are strikingly simple. The senior obstetrician who let us see around his hospital has said as much when we confessed the focus of our research was the implements per se, rather than on the perhaps more compelling (certainly more primal) attraction of birth or on female experience. "There are only very few obstetric devices,' he said, blinking as the mildly incredulous do. "And they're not very fancy." It's quite true. These implements in commonest use are forceps and ventous (inhalers for anesthetic gas count at a pinch), both possessed of a frank functionality that is pleasingly counter to the euphemisms of so-called "women's complaints". The commonest process aside from natural vaginal delivery is most probably the misleadingly named Caesarean Section. Raking about in the Wellcome's collections, the Edinburgh College of Surgeons' treasure-trove of crates or the Hunterian Museum's glass cases, showed how little over centuries the basic designs of the implements (and the basic methodology of attendant processes) have changed while the ethics of their application - now more definitely to do with the survival living babies and mothers than dead - has shifted dramatically. The merest glance at the histories of this development reveals daring, entrepreneurialism, mental toughness (the demands of complex labours requiring surgery in a time before anesthesia beggar belief) and tempering compassion.
Of course, conception and contraception and the devices they have attracted over millennia were impossible to ignore, as were the connections between them. A sidelong look at processes such as Caesarean Section seemed apt. Further connections (between magic and technology; between the church and centuries of taken-for-granted suffering; between teaching texts and courage and philanthropy; between the man-made and the human hands that were the labouring woman's only source of comfort for centuries) we made as we went along. Water, garden plants, the textures of natural materials (rubber, metal, glass, silk) inform the words, the sculptures and the pictures: a suggestion of things visible, fluid, cast with light.
Away from the heat and trauma of birth, seen in isolation or reflection, the implements, the processes which surround them, made to fit the curves and lines of female interiors, to clasp the most vulnerable of human beings, became beautiful, not only in design but in intention.
The name of this book comes from Eucharius Rösslin's book Der Swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosegarten (1513) that was the first illustrated manual of midwifery. Rösslin took the opportunity given by the advent of the new printing press to publish in German so midwives, unversed in Latin, might read it or, as the book advises, have it read to them by "a well-read woman". Jacob Rueff's updated, enlarged and improved 1587 edition added detailed information on conception, generation, birthing techniques and ethics. Jost Amman's magnificent woodcuts include illustrations of the positions of the foetus in utero, Adam and Eve and, most delightfully of all, a scene of a woman on a birth-stool flanked by female attendants as the midwife performs her duties. Implements are in a bag fastened to the midwife's belt, scissors and twine for the umbilical cord may be seen on a bank of pillows, astrologers gaze up at stars and a bath waits off-centre for the soon-to-come child. The book's title means, of course, The Rose Garden.
Then when you are braced, whether you are braced, concede. Conceive.
Admit it. Fall.
It's the verb we use of pregnancy, of love. In or out. Goes either way. One falls.
A wish, a gooseberry bush.
A spill of milk
This is the business of
The business of
This is the business of life with death, two balances in precise relation. This is the business of drawing air and of drowning fluids, of slickness and dry compression. Of making two from one, of nerves and channels, down and muscle and veins. Of dark to light, a business carried out under the broil of woollen covers, a business of touch and steel and random happenstance.
There is bleeding of course. And splitting and aweful surrender.