115 miles to the west of the Scottish mainland, there’s a tiny archipelago called St. Kilda. The main island, Hirta, is just 2.5 miles across. It is so wind-swept that nothing grows taller than a cabbage, and in a bad winter storm the waves break right over the island of Dun, which is 500 ft high. Hirta was inhabited until 1930, although the people were very poor. They scraped a living from sheep, fishing, and catching sea birds.
In the last century, the population varied between about 120 and 70, so there was never any question of having a trained doctor on the island. For most of the time, the nearest thing they had to a midwife was the knee-woman, or bean-ghluine, and outsiders were not welcome. Consequently it’s impossible to be sure exactly what the knee-woman did, but the educated guess is that when she cut the umbilical cord, she anointed it with ruby-red oil from fulmars—one of the sea birds. Certainly anointing would appeal to such a devout people.
The oil was stored in a dried goose stomach, frequently refilled and never cleaned out. 80% of the babies died of a disease they called, “the sickness of eight days,” because that’s how long the baby lived. Today it’s known as infant tetanus, and it’s agonizing.
