Wednesday, June 18th, 2025
Hannah Marsh THREAD with Nell Frizzell
Blackwell's Bookshop 48-51 Broad Street Oxford OX1 3BQ United Kingdom
Details
Thread:
A Caesarean Story of Myth, Magic and Medicine
The words '
Caesarean Section,
' are powerful. They conjure up strong emotions. For some, feelings of doubt, shame and judgement. For others a sense of safety, relief, validation and reassurance. But they are rarely spoken of in the ecstatic tones with which we celebrate so-called natural, or vaginal birth. They are rarely called beautiful, or associated with an innate sense of feminine power. Can Caesarean birth also be magical? Mystical? Awe-inspiring? Knotting its way through history, culture, folklore and human experience throughout the world,
Thread
seeks to reframe the Caesarean Section on its journey through myth, magic and medicine.
Journalist Hannah Marsh blends the medical with the mystical, charting the development of a now common procedure, once a dance between life and death: a last-ditch attempt to save a child whose mother lay dead or dying. Weaving in the arc of her own experience, a journalist's insatiable curiosity, and the stories of women, contemporary, historical and mythical, who endured, sacrificed and drove developments,
Thread
is an unflinching but compassionate examination of a procedure that nowadays remains both pedestrian and miraculous.
Hannah Marsh
Hannah Marsh is a writer living on the wild North coast of Cornwall. A former national newspaper digital editor and feature writer, she's currently exploring the story of the Caesarean section, threading her way through myth, medicine, culture and folklore.
She is, and always has been, fascinated by people, their bodies and beliefs, and has a magpie-like interest in gleaning and gathering information, stories and interesting titbits. Her book will be published in 2025.
After Hannah's son was born by emergency Caesarean section in 2017, she became steadily gripped by the story behind this procedure, nowadays so common as to be largely pedestrian, once a dangerous, last-resort dance with death. She found herself immersed in a world of gods and goddesses, pig gelders and surgeons, folk heroes and their mothers, and she knew she had a tale to untangle.
Hannah is particularly eager to tell the quiet, sometimes obscured stories of women that history has not shone a light on, but upon whose bodies and suffering so many medical developments were built.