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9780262049481

Conceiving Histories Trying for Pregnancy Past and Present

by ;
  • ISBN13:

    9780262049481

  • ISBN10:

    0262049481

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2025-02-25
  • Publisher: The MIT Press

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Summary

A fascinating and beautifully illustrated account of trying to conceive in both the past and the present.


Inspired by the author’s own experience, Conceiving Histories brings together history, personal memoir, and illustration to investigate the culturally hidden experience of trying to conceive. In elegant, engaging prose, Isabel Davis explores the combination of myth, fantasy, science, and pseudo-science that the (un)reproductive body encounters in pursuit of a viable pregnancy. The book chronicles the trying-to-conceive lifecycle arc from sex education at school, through the desire to be a parent, into the specifics of trying and struggling to conceive. It also looks back at conception throughout history to open a new vista on what we live with today.

A central argument of Davis’s is that historical people lived with the unknown just like we do but were more explicitly able to acknowledge it. In an age of assistive reproductive technologies, the act of embracing uncertainty seems difficult. Although the topic of not conceiving is potentially painful, this is not a grim book; more than grief, it is motivated by curiosity, wonder, compassion, and even humor. With 108 full-color illustrations, Conceiving Histories is also a beautiful material object, an intentionally playful antidote and supplement to Google—the resort of so many embroiled in fertility challenges.

Author Biography

Isabel Davis leads a research theme on Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum in London, and she is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading.

Supplemental Materials

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The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

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