Tag Archives: two week wait

The Experimental Conception Hospital

In the past medical practitioners were in the same boat as their patients when it came to diagnosing early pregnancy. If you’ve ever wondered ‘am I pregnant?’ you’ll know that it’s not always that straightforward to ascertain. Some people, of course, know it straight away: their symptoms are really strong and when they do a pregnancy test it’s confirmed. Others experience things differently. They might not be sure at all but getting a positive pregnancy test sorts it out for them. Those that get a negative result may have to wait a little longer to find out but, eventually, a negative is a negative and they can be sure. The ambiguity of early pregnancy is capped for us, in a way that it wasn’t in the past, by reliable tests and sonography.

Just like their patients, modern medical practitioners also have a wait before they can rely on the tests and scans. In that wait they may well feel for their patients, recognizing that the wait isn’t very easy especially if they’re waiting like this every month for years indefinitely. They don’t, though, endure the wait in quite the same way; they have lots of patients and no doubt their own preoccupations. The cap provided by modern testing technologies means that they are removed from a considerable predicament which medical practitioners faced in the past. Of course, practitioners’ concerns are different from those of their patients. Whilst some of them worried about pregnancy diagnosis because they wanted to help their patients, others worried for themselves – for their medical reputations – and others worried for society at large. After all, if you can’t diagnose pregnancy it is hard to establish paternity and so ensure correct title and property transfer, those things which underpinned social, economic and political life. In societies which put a lot of store in blood lineage, a woman’s curiosity about her condition and her future were much less important than male anxieties about whether their children were their children.

Sadly we don’t have as much historical evidence as we would like about the feelings of ordinary people who were trying to conceive and not having much luck. But what we do have is quite extensive evidence of the difficulty that practitioners report about trying to diagnose pregnancy. Looking at that evidence exposes as age-old some of the perplexities within the experience of trying to conceive and, because of this, thinking about those difficulties in the past may help us to think through our own today. Sometimes it’s easy to think that in our modern times we are peculiarly impatient, peculiarly unused to desires not being realized, peculiarly anxious to know about our futures; it’s easy to imagine that people in the past accepted unknowns more readily than us. However, that’s not what the archive shows. People in the past were just as eager as we are to know things and they thought hard about how they could to come to know them.

The Experimental Conception Hospital is a fictional laboratory invented in relation to a legitimacy case in 1825-6. It is an extraordinary idea about how conception might be pinpointed in a time before the relationships between menstruation, ovulation and the processes of conception were fully known. Our project has been working on this fantasy institution in different ways, writing an account of it for publication but also making art work which takes a different look at the Hospital. We have put together a little 5 minute film (below). The images are part of a long piece of artwork which Anna Burel is making to present the Hospital’s 100 female experimental subjects. They are in different stages of undress and take up different postures. They are waiting, queueing perhaps. They are faceless, wearing masks. They are just numbers. The sound gives the full text of the Hospital’s description, detailing how it will be arranged. It is a dream institution which will resolve the questions of law raised by the difficulties of pregnancy diagnosis. It is imagined from a male perspective and gives no thought at all to the people incarcerated and experimented on. It is a dark Gothic science-fiction, an erotic fantasy about walling up women.

Introducing Conceiving Histories

This project came from my own experience of trying to conceive, such a strange encounter with the body in time. This encounter is a constant shifting of both the future, as our desires for ourselves repeatedly take shape and dissolve, and the present, breaking up the present into the phases of the menstrual cycle. The time before it is possible to test for pregnancy is often referred to as ‘the two week wait’. This phrase developed in relation to assisted reproductive technologies: two weeks is the time between the transfer of an embryo and the time you can test to see if the transfer has been successful. The phrase has moved over to cover a similar sized gap between ovulation and testing for those trying to conceive naturally.

Is it two weeks? Because negative pregnancy test results are less reliable than positive ones, for lots of women who aren’t pregnant it takes a little longer, actually, to finally accept that there’s no pregnancy that month. So, two to three weeks? Well yes, except that many women and their partners are waiting like this month on month, year on year, possibly forever. That time can sometimes feel like a waste of energy, a dispiriting and depressingly predictable cycle of the same emotions.

Pocket watches
Waiting… waiting… waiting…

As an academic who works on the past, it struck me that this  wait, with its strange rhythms, swirling impressions and fantasies, symptoms and nebulous signs, was oddly historic. It didn’t feel very modern not to know, to be fed false information by my body, to believe and yet to be so wrong.

So, I began to read. If this is what it’s like today, what was it like in the past?

I am finding that the archives are full with materials about the difficulties of trying to diagnose early pregnancy. Before the advent of home test kits, in the late 1970s, pregnancy testing was usually reserved for particularly hard cases – for people with very irregular cycles for example, or for people with medical conditions for whom pregnancy could be dangerous. Before the advent of reliable pregnancy testing in the early twentieth century accurate diagnosis of pregnancy was often a hard thing to do.

Women, men and medical practitioners were all exposed to this difficulty, the ambiguity of the not yet or just pregnant body. Their desire to know first imagined (and so made possible) the technologies we count on today. Sometimes it’s easy to imagine that people were more accepting in the past; but that isn’t what I’m finding. People were as anxious as we are to know things, like what shape their families would have in their futures.

All the literature on trying to conceive for people today acknowledges the difficulty of this wait. Lots of organisations are hosting and setting up support for people who experience it.  This project seeks to do something a little different: to get into that waiting space, to think harder about the psychological and physiological ambiguity it exposes and, perhaps, to offer people a toolbox – a modern engagement with extraordinary archival materials – with which to manage the wait in their own lives. Conceiving Histories may have started by thinking about the two week wait but it fast moved beyond that to consider all sorts of questions in the time of pre-pregnancy, a broad term which might incorporate trying to conceive, infertility, early pregnancy and the politics of childlessness. Women and men, married, single, gay or straight have babies or don’t and this project is about and for them all, to connect their griefs, joys and frustrations to an extraordinary history.

So, I am working through archival materials and will be writing about them here and elsewhere but I am also working with an artist, Anna Burel, who is interested in some similar questions and has been working for a long time to think about the female body and particularly under medical scrutiny. Together we are thinking about how contemporary visual art, as well as writing of different kinds, might be a way to gather insight into historic materials for use in our own lives.

So check back here to see how our project is developing. There will also be ways for you to get involved, should you want to. In particular, we are hoping to incorporate people’s reflections and reactions to our project into the progress of its research. Let me know (email: i.davis@bbk.ac.uk) if you’d like to be added to my mailing list about events and other project news or leave a comment below to tell us what you think.

 

Featured Image: detail from Le livre de Lancelot du Lac, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library MS 229, fol. 31r.