Full term? Notes from the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collections
In today’s app governed world, women are encouraged to track their periods, to best understand their body’s hormonal cycle, nutritional needs – and fertility. Such data – like it or not – is also used for other purposes, including cynical marketing.[1] For modern medical professionals, tracking is an important means to date conception and to forecast the date at which a child might be born. Such knowledge ideally allows for timely preparations to be made, scans booked, midwife appointments pencilled-in and birth arrangements to be made.
However, in early modern Scotland, predicting the moment at which a child might be born was a difficult task. One could only be certain of conception at ‘quickening’, i.e., when a mother felt the child move in her womb. Unfortunately, no one was sure when quickening took place, other than around the third or fourth month, the moment differing in each woman and pregnancy.
Thanks to Michelle and the extremely helpful team in the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collections, I was able to see fascinating records which show one eighteenth-century doctor, David Skene, pursuing a mathematically informed approach to dating conception and birth: this was aided by his patients’ own early modern period tracking.
University of Aberdeen's Sir Duncan Rice Library (Photo: Philippa Woodcock)
Dr David Skene (1731-1770), graduated MA from Marischal College in 1748 and after training in medicine and midwifery in Edinburgh, London and Paris, returned to Aberdeen, where he was awarded MD in 1753. He established midwifery training in Aberdeen and went into practice with his father.[2] He is noted as a founding father of women’s healthcare in Aberdeen, with his impact explored in the exhibition.[3]
Among his general practice notes, preserved in copy form as MS 476, are intricately detailed obstetric case-studies: some of these are graphic accounts of miscarriage, but the happier yet perplexing case of Mrs Irvine – case 53 from 1769 - shows the doctor and his patient insisting upon different dates of conception.
MS 476, case 53, © University of Aberdeen Special Collections
Firstly, his notes introduce us to Mrs Irvine, ‘healthy a red pimpl’d face has 6 children’. She told Skene that her last menstrual period began on Nov 27 [1768] and had finished by Nov 30. (In my experience, this is a very accurate recording for a mother of six!) For Skene, this meant she would be due to give birth in very late August 1769: this was based on used of the 40-week calculator from the date of the first day of last period, and supposing she conceived on 1 December 1768.
Despite these initial certainties, Mrs Irvine’s pregnancy was not easy, and she recorded its challenges for Skene. On Feb. 2 1769 ‘she alter’d [bled] violently, w[i]th blood half down her leg, but it lasted only five hours’. More happily, ‘about Mar. 10 she first felt motion’. Although she had bled, she had felt the child move at about three months gestation.
Her troubles continued. ‘Every 6 weeks after Feb 2 - she had a show of altering - from July 17 the menses continued tho slightly for 2 days’. At seven and a half months, on ‘July 24 the membranes broke & a great deal of water came away – almost every day since more or less water has come away & she has had frequently pains’. Indeed, ‘from the 3d month to the time of the water first coming away she has fainted generally twice every day’.
What would happen as her time neared? Well, on ‘Aug 19 1769 She had frequent pains all days – I saw her Aug 20 at 1 AM pains frequent & strong. ..head coming down every pain has its effect – at 2AM the membrane broke & a small quantity of water came, at 3AM a child came very easily- a fine and not large boy N.B. The belly was quite pendulous’. (Poor Mrs Irvine).
Skene should have been delighted – he had delivered a healthy baby and helped a strong mother to an easy recovery. And he was pleased. But he was also perplexed at the discrepancy between the actual date of delivery on 20 August, and the late-August date he had in mind, musing, ‘she had only carried her child 8 months & 20 days ie 263 days’.
So, she was delivered somewhat early according to her dates and to Skene’s experience. But should this have been a surprise? She had already given birth to at least six children and was clearly healthy: Skene’s notes show that although she suffered from ‘flooding’ (in this context referring to post-partum bleeding), it ‘went off’ at exactly the time that she predicted from experience, i.e. 28 days after birth.
More interesting medically was the fact that she seemed to have carried a child almost to term with very little in utero water to cushion him, which Skene seems to relate to the lunar calendar. ‘She was delivered the 28 day or past 4 weeks after the first water – the 19 day of this moon 2 16/24 days after full.’
Thus, a combination of the woman’s knowledge of her own body and her willingness to record and describe her cycle and symptoms, meant that a fascinating case-study was recorded. Here we see the meeting of science and personal experience, and evidence of the eighteenth century understanding of still popular beliefs about the relationship between the menstrual and lunar cycles.
Ps. We don’t encourage use of AI at 杏吧原创. However, I asked one such platform, ‘Given these dates, when might Mrs Irvine’s due date have been?’ Using a date of last period of 27-30 November 1768 , AI predicted she would have given birth on 3 September 1769. AI doesn’t get everything right.
The lunar and menstrual cycle, a proposed model from
[1] , The Times, 10 June 2025
[2] Thanks to the very detailed notes on David Skene provided by Special Collections,
[3]