12/07/2026
Hats off to this scientist. The sad thing is that this kind of thinking still exists in women's health; so often advice is given by medical professionals and it's a mix of evidence-based and stuff that's just been passed down.
It's so important to me when I teach that I'm not just parroting stuff from a course. Advice should be evidence-based, particularly in stages of change where our bodies are going through something which puts us in a vulnerable position.
If the advice doesn't feel right, ask for studies that back up what they are telling you. Ask for proof.
For generations, women were told that the most dangerous thing they could do after giving birth was... lie down.
Instead, countless new mothers were propped upright in bed for days, sometimes even weeks, exhausted bodies strapped into an unnatural sitting position because respected physicians insisted it was safer. They claimed gravity would prevent deadly complications. Few questioned it. Fewer still asked why women seemed to suffer so much under a treatment that felt like torture.
The practice became so accepted that hospitals built special beds to keep mothers elevated. Nurses adjusted pillows. Families watched women struggle to sleep while recovering from one of the most physically demanding experiences imaginable. Pain was expected. Discomfort was dismissed. The fact that mothers hated it was often treated as proof that the treatment was working.
Then one woman decided that "everyone knows" was not evidence.
Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi had already shattered barriers simply by becoming one of the first American women to receive a medical degree from the prestigious Paris Faculty of Medicine. She was brilliant, relentless, and deeply skeptical of medical traditions built more on assumption than proof.
When she examined the supposed science behind keeping postpartum women upright, she found remarkably little. The practice had survived largely because doctors repeated what earlier doctors had taught them. So Jacobi did something surprisingly radical for the nineteenth century: she gathered evidence.
Her research demonstrated that prolonged upright confinement offered no medical benefit and often made recovery more difficult. Resting comfortably, including lying flat when appropriate, was not the threat physicians had imagined. The real danger was unquestioned authority dressed up as medical certainty.
Jacobi spent her career dismantling myths that disproportionately burdened women, insisting that medicine should be guided by observation rather than tradition. She challenged flawed beliefs about menstruation, education, and childbirth at a time when doing so meant confronting some of the most influential men in medicine.
