More On Cauls and Sacs September 9, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite, Contemporary, Medieval, Modern , trackback
Anthropologists have their work cut out for them. Despite the fact that we are all – from the Kalihari Bushman to the Californian surfer – one and the same species, there are so many differences between human societies, as to be almost embarrassing. However, there are a series of important and trivial facts that bind us together. We are men and we are women: even if gender differences vary wildly, gender division is a constant. We eat and defecate, we chew our nails, we have sex and we have children. How tempting to take then one aspect of this and examine it right through the beam of human experience following the grain down the cut log.
Beach confessed in a post the other month to being fascinated by cauls, the amniotic sac that all of us grow in within the womb. As noted there, in very rare instances a child is born with the caul on their face or on their chest. Children who are ‘born with the shirt’ or ‘born with the helmet’ or ‘the hood’ are often considered to have supernatural abilities: and certainly there are plenty of well-documented cases of this belief from hunter-gather societies, to modern pre-industrial and industrial societies. Just imagine a map of the world shaded according to caul belief, in minute detail. (Beach has a sudden vision of himself as a centenearian, muttering to a long-suffering research assistant, ‘just twelve more countries to go, Johannes, and then we can start colouring in the continents…)
Perhaps what is particularly attractive about using the caul is that the moment of birth, far more than the moment of eating say or making love, almost wipes out cultural differences. A woman, whose water has broken, with a three or four kilo child within her, can only do so many things and the birther or midwife is faced whether in a Californian hospital or in a grove in South Africa with the same essential situation if a child emerges from its mother with the caul still attached. Off the top of his head, Beach can’t think of a single other biological process that is: (i) universal; (ii) so easy to isolate; (iii) rare enough to be special, but not so rare as to be impossible to research. Any equivalents: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
On the question of rarity several online sources claim that one in 80,000 children are born with the caul. That would mean that about fifty cauled children are born a year in the US and that most midwives would never, even in a long working life, see a cauled child. Wikipedia, the mother of many lies, is among them and is very possibly the originator of this fiction. It must be a significantly higher number given the number of accounts. For example, most villages in Friuli in Italy seemed to have ‘cauled ones’ in the early modern period.
PS If you have a strong stomach there follows the story of the baby who didn’t know it had been born (happy ending warning) Perhaps the confusion with the numbers comes because of the difference between the amniotic sac still being intact and a child being simply cauled, i.e. the remains of the sack are over the head.
