Sailors once paid fortunes for a newborn's caul to avoid drowning
A caul is a scrap of birth membrane clinging to a newborn's head and face. For centuries it was treated as a lucky charm: medieval women sold them to sailors as protection against drowning, and Dickens's David Copperfield opens with his own caul advertised in the newspapers for fifteen guineas.
Two membranes surround a fetus: the thin inner amnion, which holds the baby and its fluid, and the outer chorion, which helps form the placenta. The commonest caul is a translucent piece of amnion that tears free and presses against the head during delivery. A rarer event, the en caul or mermaid birth, sees the baby emerge still inside the whole intact sac, fed oxygen through the umbilical cord. It happens more often in caesarean deliveries, and most en caul births are premature.
How rare is it? The figure usually quoted is fewer than 1 in 80,000 births. A retrospective study of all 1,382 births at one Swedish hospital in 2023 found something very different: 21 caul births, or 1.5%, linked to spontaneous, low-intervention labour and with no harm to the babies. The authors called for larger studies. Removal is simple for a thin caul, which slides off, but a thicker one needs care: a small cut across the nostrils so the child can breathe, then slow peeling, because tearing it off too fast can leave scars. Research in the 2020s suggests delivering very premature babies with the sac intact may improve survival by shielding them from the uterus's contractions.
Folklore made much of the membrane. Medieval Europeans saw it as an omen of greatness, and midwives pressed it onto paper as a keepsake for the mother. Several languages describe lucky people as born in a bonnet or a shirt, and the Russian version now tags dashcam clips of narrow escapes. In Jamaican belief, ghosts called duppy are powerless against caul-born people. Not every tradition was kind: Romanian lore said such children would become strigoi after death.
Sceptics existed early. The 16th-century Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius doubted the charms, and the comic poet Thomas Hood mocked a sailor drowning despite his talisman. Writers kept returning to it, giving Danny in The Shining a caul, and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead a narrator supposedly safe from drowning.
Source: Caul
