50 Ulysses Aldrovandi

The position of the infant in the womb.

# CHILDBIRTH

It is impossible to express how much more bitterly women suffer the agonies of childbirth compared to other animals, which torment them during labor; indeed, some suffer from ill health from the very beginning of conception until the fetus reaches maturity.

If one investigates the duration of pregnancy, it is fixed for other animals, but by no means for humans, since infants born in the seventh, eighth, and tenth months have been known to survive. Although some authors have recorded that fetuses brought into the light before the seventh month are not viable, that those born in the eighth month do not survive, and that those arriving in the seventh month are quite weak, Schenckius nevertheless notes in his *Observations* cases of infants born in the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and even eleventh months who were viable.

According to Saint Bernard in the *Life of Saint Malachy*, a noblewoman gave birth in the sixteenth month after drinking holy water. Furthermore, Schenckius relates that there was once a wife of Duke Baruch of the Vandals who conceived and, after being pregnant for two years, finally gave birth to a child who could walk and talk. There was even a woman mentioned by the same author who carried a child in her womb for four years without any discomfort; indeed, while she had been plagued by countless ailments before conception, she was freed from them all while carrying the child.

For the most part, however, the ninth month is said to be the time of labor. Therefore, Avicenna, weighing the duration of pregnancy, eventually proposed that a formed fetus, in double the time