Verbotene Liebe, verborgene Kinder: Das Geheime Buch des Gottinger Geburtshospitals, 1794–1857 by Jürgen Schlumbohm (review)

No one knows more about the history of the Göttingen Lying-In Hospital than Jürgen Schlumbohm. Over the last decade he has authored or edited several works on the famous Accouchierhaus there. One might, therefore, be excused for expecting that his book would simply present another chapter of the story. It certainly does, but the orientation is very different; the author’s other long-term interests in the history of kinship and family inform a study that is based on an unexpected archival find: the “Secret Book” kept by the hospital’s physician-directors from the closing years of the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century.

The history of the Secret Book itself and the ways in which the author worked to tease out meanings from entries deliberately obscured with strike-outs create almost as intriguing a tale as the stories hidden within its covers. The Secret Book was held privately and came to light only after Schlumbohm published Lebendige Phantome in 2012.¹ Three successive directors of the Lying-In Hospital used this book to record the “secret births” that took place there. Unlike the vast majority of patients, who were generally poor women giving birth to illegitimate children, these clients (and clients they were) neither provided pedagogical material nor were charity cases. Rather, they, their lovers, or their families paid for confidentiality, better care than the other lying-in women, and a chance to deliver their children in a way that would conceal their “difficult positions” (“die heikle Fällen” [p. 8]). Unlike the other patients, they were delivered almost always by the doctors in separate, private rooms, and were rarely seen, and almost never touched, by the male medical and surgical students.

Schlumbohm’s excellent new book sympathetically accounts for the results of “forbidden love.” As he observes, we already know a great deal—partly due to his own efforts—about the problems of pregnant, unmarried servants, peasant girls, and those lacking all resources, as well as, from the work of others, about the lives and loves of court mistresses and aristocratic nonmarital relationships. Until now, however, accounts treating the social groups in between—bourgeois women, daughters of petty nobles, and administrative officials—have been missing. Working from the entries in the Secret Book, augmented by additional material inserted in it (letters petitioning for admittance, written interventions of friends and colleagues, payments for the care of the children born in the institution, and more), Schlumbohm reconstructs, often in great detail, the lives behind the documents.

Schlumbohm carefully extracts clues from the Secret Book and then, in a masterful display of archival and historical skills, follows the spoor, producing compelling life biographies and convincing historical interpretations for the people he discovered in its pages. In the end, as Schlumbohm points out, the circumstances of these lives—of human beings caught in unfortunate, embarrassing, or even socially and economically devastating situations—reveal few similarities (besides the obvious one). Rather the “details demonstrate that the women and men involved for various reasons, in differentiated ways, and with different subsequent histories” (p. 175) found it necessary to avail themselves of the special facilities the Göttingen Lying-In Hospital offered. This unusual service could, as one of its longtime directors commented, serve “the satisfaction, honor, and happiness of an individual and also an entire family” (p. 179), while it also bent, or even ruptured, the bonds of traditional morality. A dozen chapters sketch out the individual circumstances of the woman’s admission, often her subsequent life and that of her lover, husband, child, and family. Whether the particular story turned on “hidden love during wartime” (p. 21 and passim), the relationship of a medical student and the mother of his several (illegitimate) children, the painful situation of a theology student who impregnated his wife-to-be before their marriage...