Placental afterlives: Shifting notions of waste and value in midwifery practice in early modern Europe

Abstract

It is commonly believed that the placenta and umbilical cord gained significance for the first time within medical discourse in the 1980s, since they contain blood-forming stem cells. This paper looks at how birthing ‘by-products,’ namely, the placenta and cord blood, have long histories of shifting relations between bodily ‘waste’ and ‘value.’ A critical reading of germinal medical manuals on midwifery, circulating in early modern Europe between sixteenth and eighteenth century, demonstrates that the placenta and umbilical cord first transitioned from ‘value’ to ‘waste,’ much like they turned from ‘waste’ to ‘gold’ in late twentieth century biomedical discourse of the Global North. The paper proposes that the relationship between ‘waste’ and ‘value’ at the site of birthing, can only be can only be understood by mapping them onto the larger epistemic shifts that occurred in the field of medicine, therapeutics and knowledge about the body, in early modern Europe, alongside questioning our own conceptual categories through which we know the past.