Rarely seen due to its age and rarity, a 500-year-old birthing girdle is currently on display at the Wellcome Collection.
A birthing girdle, or scroll, was a long length of parchment inscribed with Christian prayers and charms to protect a mother and child, and often wrapped around the mother during childbirth. Particularly popular between the 12th and 16th centuries, they were suppressed during the English Reformation, and most were thought to have been destroyed.
A few survive, and one of the better examples is currently on display at the Wellcome Collection in central London.
In a dimly lit room, you can press a switch to light up the scroll, and candidly, it’s not much to look at now – a long length of fabric with some very faded text and images on it. A sign says it contains an anti-semetic image, but you’d never know that by looking at it.
Fortunately, it’s been scanned into a digital display nearby and you can take a much closer look at the text and images, and I would still struggle to identify the anti-semetic message, but it’s there. Presumably as a prayer to prevent a child from being born Jewish by people who didn’t quite understand how that worked.
There’s also a video that explains how recent research on the scroll’s stains has proven it was in use during childbirth.
The scroll is the centerpiece of a wider exhibition on the myths and traditions of giving birth, which opens with a 15th-16th century painting of childbirth in a wealthy home, and ranges through to modern contemporary art.
It’s a fairly small exhibition, more of an extra to visit to take in if already visiting the Wellcome Collection’s other main exhibitions – but the rare chance to see the birthing girdle and learn about this less well known medieval medical practice is worth it.
The exhibition, Expecting: Birth, Belief and Protection, is at the Wellcome Collection until April 2026 and is free to visit.
Incidentally, whenever you hear how people used to die much younger than today, often in the 30s and 40s — it’s not because people actually died that young — but because childbirth was so dangerous. It’s the average mortality that’s cited.
If, for example, you have a man who lives to 60 and his wife who dies in childbirth aged 20 — the average life expectancy would be recorded as 40 years old. If a woman got past the age of being expected to be pregnant, she probably would live to a ripe old age.
In a way, the story that people died young in the Middle Ages masks the reality that most people could live a decently long life if only medical care had been better. And it was the women who bore the brunt of that.
