Trying to conceive, and struggling to, means confronting a particular type of not-knowing that has no precedent in a repertoire of bodily experiences. Try as we might to discern the inklings of life sparking up in a womb, a pregnancy ‘diagnosis’ suggests only some of the story. The rest concerns whether an embryo is actually busy developing, and further, whether its trajectory is set to be one of a live birth. Even now, with powerful computers in our pockets, and plans to land people on Mars, no technology, algorithm or scientific expertise can beat these unknowns. As the head of miscarriage research at the UK’s leading institute once said to me, we are still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fully understanding human conception and what follows after.
Dr Isabel Davis, an historian, takes on the common, and hidden, experiences of women’s embodied reproductive lives (as well as those who weren’t necessarily trying to conceive, but doled out the inevitable risk of it). She writes with an extraordinary depth of scholarship that sits lightly on the page, guiding you through some complex analysis with wit, gripping anecdotes and a perfectly poised balance between these and her moving personal memoir. Along the way, we learn about the acquisition – and keeping – of tropical toads (zenopus laevis) from South Africa after the war (until the late 60s at least) that were used for pregnancy testing in the UK. In labs hidden from view, countless female toads were injected with women’s wee, and if they ovulated, this was the equivalent of a modern day second line emerging on a small plastic wand.
To pluck just two of many more wonderfully researched stories, Queen Mary’s ‘phantom pregnancy’ is explored in some depth, as is the idea of the (fictional, and alarming) Experimental Conception Hospital by an early 19th century doctor, Robert Lyall. A unifying theme emerges: even then (early modern history when records begin to thicken), as we do now, people attempted to swerve, control or manipulate existential truths: uncertainty, liminality, disappointments and beliefs in our bodies that are ‘wrong’. However, Davis seems to suggest that our ancestors may well have handled all of this better than we do now, without the intrusion of technologies that have only taken us so far. “The things we choose to renounce – unknowing, faith, folklore – must be pushed out of modernity, backwards into history, even though in practice, they sit all around us amongst everything we categorise as modern, although in what exact combination it is difficult to assess. The tremendous strength of this tremendously rich narrative is in how it connects us to our past, and reinforces the obscurities that trying to conceive bring.”
Davis has a tremendous gift with words, but the territory she traverses is inherently obscure, so it seems appropriate that she chose a collaboration with the artist Anna Burel to provide another means to convey the complexities of a relationship betweeen knowledge, minds and bodies. Her illustrations had me equally compelled to the page as the words.