In early modern Europe there was a wide array of drinks, powders, and poultices that were supposed to prevent miscarriage. Recipes for these miscarriage preventives can be found in printed books, in Latin as well as vernacular, as well as in manuscript family recipe books. Although miscarriage is a condition that we recognize today, it is not one we think of as curable. By modern estimates, about a quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The aim of treatment is usually to make the miscarriage as safe and pain free as possible, not to stop it from happening. Given that we in the twenty-first century no longer believe that it is medically possible to stop most miscarriages, it is natural to ask why early modern people, both physicians and lay men and women, were so convinced that they could. My contention is that the ingredients in miscarriage remedies were richly resonant substances, with multiple layers of meaning. Only by teasing out these layers of meaning can we hope to understand why early modern people believed these remedies were efficacious. The ingredients used in these recipes are global, ranging from herbs grown in family gardens to plant, mineral, and animal substances imported from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the early modern period, diverse theories of the body, health, and disease coexisted: humoral medicine, rooted in Greek, Latin and Arabic texts; chymical medicine, derived from the writings of Paracelsus and his followers; and natural magic, a tradition with ancient roots given new intellectual weight in the early modern period by Giambattista della Porta and others. The efficacy of various ingredients could be explained differently, depending on which of these competing theories the patient or practitioner espoused. And many ingredients had potent symbolic and religious associations that are not easily disentangled from their medicinal virtues. Finally, some of the substances used in miscarriage remedies were valuable commodities, with economic and political meanings that shaped their use.
