{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1816",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1816,
    "subject": "Dorcas' death in childbirth",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-10-04T11:36:17+00:00",
    "last": "1999-10-04T11:36:17+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0028-0167@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jonathan Laidlow",
        "address": "laidlojm at hhs.bham.ac.uk"
      },
      "date": "1999-10-04T11:36:17+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Dorcas' death in childbirth",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Hello folks,\n\nI'm only barely keeping up with Urth at the moment - welcome to all \nthe new posters. I'm very pleased to see that all discussion of Short \nSun is being kept on the Whorl list - copies have yet to filter into the \nUK as far as I can tell. I'm currently rereading Long Sun in \npreparation.\n\nOn the Dorcas post - what a fascinating essay Roy! It deserves \nmore study before I respond in full, but perhaps I could answer the \npoint about Dorcas' death in childbirth.\n\nYou say that death in childbirth is a fictional device, and may just be \nCaron's way of avoiding the issue. Now as recently as the \neighteenth century (and the nineteenth) death in childbirth was very \nvery common. To give an eighteenth century example which I've \npicked up from my studies of Laurence Sterne, if a cesaerian was \nrequired then the mother would die. There was no recorded \nexample of a mother surviving such an operation.  Many more \nchildren would die during childhood, hence the need for large \nfamilies to help in the family employment, whatever that might be.\n\nNow Urth does have hi-tech resources, but they are not available to \neveryone, and I doubt very much that they were available to Dorcas \nand Caron. I presume that medical knowledge for the masses was \nat best at a pre-20th century level, and thus if Dorcas did indeed \nhave a difficult pregnancy, then she would likely not have survived.\n\nA similar point about her age - before the twentieth century \ndaughters would often be married away straight after adolescence. \nThis was obviously much more common for poor families than for \nrich. Even in fiction (and I'm thinking of that whole genre of novels \nwhere a poor girl marries 'upwards' in society - Samuel \nRichardson's 'Pamela' is perhaps the best C18 example) the girls \nare usually very young. They would have been indentured as \nservants as soon as possible, so that their poor family did not have \nto support them any longer.\n\nJonathan\nVisit Ultan's Library - A Gene Wolfe web resource\nhttp://members.tripod.co.uk/laidlow/index.htm\nJonathan Laidlow\nUniversity of Birmingham, UK"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}