Girdles: their origin and development, particularly with regard to their use as charms in medicine, marriage, and midwifery / [Walter J. Dilling].

  • Dilling, Walter J. (Walter James), 1886-1950.
Date:
1913-14
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Girdles: their origin and development, particularly with regard to their use as charms in medicine, marriage, and midwifery / [Walter J. Dilling]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    bdt is removed next morning. This belt, termed the “squaw belt, is a leathern belt about 4 inches wide, decorated with thiee buckles, and is applied by the woman herself as tightly as her strength permits.1 These cases resemble the use which is made of the binder in modern times, and therefore require no further comment. Amongst other tribes, such as the Nez-Perces, the Gros- Ventres, the Pahutes, the Creeks, and the Piutes, a different custom is preserved. They apply a leather girdle around the waist above the fundus of the uterus, slackly enough to slip up and down ; as expulsive pains come on, attendant women push the girdle down after the escaping child. The Piute Indians, and perhaps the others also, regard the descent of the child as voluntary on its part, and push the girdle down to support it in its progress so that it shall not lose its foothold and slip back, thereby losing all the distance gained in its effort to reach food and daylight; its footsteps are followed therefore until, as they say, it has asserted its freedom and broken its fast.2 Next, a few instances collected from the Continent of Africa. During a Zulu confinement, a medical man in Natal has recorded that “a grass rope is tightly fastened round the middle of the woman in labour to keep the infant from slipping up again.”3 The reader will observe that we have passed in review several examples of this belief, which appears to be prevalent particularly amongst the less civilised communities. To races unlearned in anatomy such an idea would be quite natural, as they must have learned by practical experience of the uterine relaxations and the retreat of the presenting part. Although I have no stated authority and it is unwise to judge from an illustration,4 I am nevertheless inclined to the belief that the girdle is also worn in Zululand during pregnancy, but not as a rule by non- pregnant women. Strange to say, some Zulu girdles in my possession, unfortunately minus the essential information as to their employment, are decorated with beads of three colours arranged in rows of three, but, in absence of any proof of their use, I can lay no stress on this fact. Amongst 1 G. J. Engelmann, “Labor among Primitive Peoples,” St. Louis, 1883> second edition, pp. 18, 25, 84-5, 160-1 (illus.), 189-90. ^ Ibid., pp. 91, 129, 139, 187. 3 “British Medical Journal,” 28th October, 1911, p. 1144. ■» “Living Races of Mankind,” edited by H. N. Hutchinson (N.D.), vol. ii, ]). 303.