Meet Dr Paige Donaghy, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in History

In 2024 Dr Paige Donaghy commenced a prestigious McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship, supporting her historical research on the origins of what we now understand to be obstetric violence in British medicine and culture. PhD candidate in history Jesse Seeberg-Gordon sat down with Paige to talk about her research background, current projects, and the importance of studying the past.

I understand you specialise in the history of European sexuality, reproduction, and medicine in the 1500s into the 1800s. Before we talk about your work, why don’t you tell us about how you came to be interested in this topic?

I think there are two things that motivated my interest in these areas.

First, I have always been fascinated by the intersections between medicine, bodies and human stories. When I was young, I would often read through my mum’s nursing textbooks. I was interested by abstract medical ideas and images, but also the complex human stories that went along with them, which my mum would talk to me about after her long shifts at work.

The second way I became curious about this particular time period and place was through a special course on the history of medicine which I took during my undergraduate degree—it was fabulous and opened up my eyes to this field as an area of further study. I then completed an Honours thesis on the history of early modern medicine and fell in love with the field!

Tell us about your PhD project on non-foetal pregnancies like “false conceptions”. Why did you choose this topic, and what were your findings?

Sure! But reader beware – I will discuss some intense bodily topics ahead.

I finished my PhD in 2023 at the University of Queensland, where I explored the medical and cultural history of reproductive phenomena I call “false generation”. In early modern Europe, [circa 1500–1800], this included things such as “false conceptions”, “moles”, and “molae”, which were understood during this time as pregnancies which did not produce foetuses, but formless lumps of flesh. They might be compared to contemporary conditions such as molar pregnancy, but they probably also included things like uterine fibroids, tumours, pregnancy losses and so on.

I chose this topic not only because it had been vastly understudied, but because in the age before reliable pregnancy testing, false generation caused women, their families, and medical practitioners many problems. For instance, I found that many early modern women experienced ‘false conception’ as a pregnancy, and then subsequently pregnancy loss, as they could not determine the difference between true and false pregnancies.

I discovered too that these false conceptions appeared in criminal trials, in cases of women accused of infanticide – often they told juries that they had not committed the crime of child murder, but instead their pregnancies were false conceptions. Contrary to what we might expect, my research revealed that women who had false pregnancies were rarely, if ever, accused of witchcraft or of individually causing the false pregnancy; rather, most early moderns envisioned false generation as an error of reproduction.

You’re now focusing on obstetric violence in British medicine for your postdoctoral work here at the University of Melbourne. Did this project grow out of your PhD? What is your source base? And what findings do you think the project might have in store for you?

That’s right! This project came out of my doctoral research in some respects, but it was also shaped by other research projects I was lucky enough to be involved with before coming to Melbourne.

At UQ, I was a research assistant on a few projects investigating issues of historical and contemporary gender-based violence, such as sexual assault and consent. During this time, I started researching premodern histories of sexual and gender violence, and I became really interested in the connections between gender, emotions, and obstetric medicine, and how these squared with contemporary ideas about obstetric harm and violence.

Sociologists, midwives and public health researchers have shown, through their work, that our current issues of obstetric violence have long and complex histories. My project at Melbourne explores how these issues play out at a time when childbirth care was undergoing significant changes in Britain, from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.  Over this period, male medical practitioners edged out female practitioners from midwifery, resulting in significant gendered changes to the ways in which women gave birth.

To explore these issues, I have been researching many medical and midwifery books, hospital records, physician casebooks, women’s diaries and letters, among many other sources. I am about to embark on my first big research trip for this project in March, so I’m very excited!

In terms of the project’s findings, I’m aiming to produce a new history of obstetric medicine in this period, one which thinks about the intersections between emotion, gender, and concepts of bodily autonomy.

Questions of ‘relevance’ are sometimes raised when it comes to history pre-dating the modern era. Why do you think your research matters, and what relevance do you believe it has for us in the year 2025?

This is definitely a question I get asked when I talk to people outside the academy about historical research. Something I like to remind folks is that without historians, we can’t understand how and why we got here; for histories of medicine and reproduction, I think this is particularly true.

Modern Western reproductive medicine is built on at least a thousand years of knowledge, experimentation and, most importantly, individual experiences, and this is built into how medicine is practiced today.

I think my research matters for a few reasons, chief among them being that the historical areas I am researching—non-foetal pregnancy, pregnant women’s sexuality, obstetric violence—are areas that are still significantly under-researched today.

In terms of relevance for 2025, I think it’s easy to point to the fact that obstetric violence is an enormous problem here in Australia that governments and medical institutions are only now beginning to grapple with — see for instance, the 2024 NSW Parliament’s Select Committee Report on Birth Trauma. With deeper historical understanding of obstetric violence, we are better placed to tackle ongoing issues in gender-based violence.

As an historian, I’m sure you see inherent value in the study of history. If you could give three pieces of advice or encouragement to an undergraduate student who is considering pursuing a degree in history, what would they be? 

 Absolutely! First, I would encourage you to pursue a degree in history if you are passionate or interested in historical studies—students in this field are often told that history or even arts degrees broadly are ‘useless’, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only do you learn an extensive amount of useful knowledge about how our world came to be the way it is today, but you develop really strong skills in a range of areas, including communication, analysis, and creativity. This is important for any future employment, even if you end up working outside history.

Secondly, for students interested in the degree, I would really recommend taking courses at Melbourne that you may at first not think are the most interesting or relevant to you – this is a fantastic way to broaden your historical horizons and gain a breadth of knowledge.

And finally, the last piece of advice I’d give is that studying history will make you an excellent trivia player – everyone will want you on their team!

In 2023 Paige Donaghy completed her PhD at the University of Queensland, where she was the recipient of the University of Queensland’s inaugural Berlin Residency Award. She has published and taught on a range of topics in early modern and medieval history. She is currently working on two book projects, provisionally titled Pregnant Women’s Sexuality in Early Modern England(under contract with Palgrave Macmillan) and Moles, False Conceptions and False Pregnancy in British Medicine, 1550–1850 (under contract with Durham University’s Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies series ‘Science in Culture, c. 350–c. 1750′). Dr Donaghy is also Managing Co-Editor of the Australian Women’s History Network blog, VIDA, a member of the Faculty of Arts’ Medical Humanities Research Lab, and an ECR co-convenor of the new Reproductive Justice Hallmark Initiative at the University of Melbourne.