James L. Franklin
Chicago, Illinois, United States

In the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel David Copperfield, the titular narrator David Copperfield informs us that he was “born with a caul.” He relates further that the caul was advertised in the newspapers at the “low price” of fifteen guineas in hopes that a sea-faring buyer would come forth. This was based on the widespread myth that to have been born with a caul or to own a caul protected one from drowning. As there were no serious takers, the advertisement was withdrawn. A decade later, to the narrator’s discomfort, a part of him, his caul, was offered in a raffle “at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings.” His caul was won by an old lady whose only connection to water was to walk across a bridge or drink tea. Triumphantly she died in bed at ninety-two.¹

The late Thomas R. Forbes, former Professor of Anatomy and medical historian at Yale University in his comprehensive “The Social History of the Caul,” reports: “Cauls were formerly offered for sale near the London and Liverpool docks, and advertisements for the commodity appeared in British newspapers until at least the First World War.” The price asked for a caul was influenced by both supply and the perceived hazard sailors faced when embarking on a voyage. In 1815, at the time of Lord Nelson and the great sea battles, “the price paid by British sailors reached 30 guineas.”² The “low price” of 15 guineas mentioned in the novel was several months’ wages for a working man at the time. In the years leading up to the First World War, a caul could be purchased for a few schillings. The superstition had not died and in the face of the deadly submarine warfare begun during the Great War, sailors paid as much as three to five pounds for the protective membrane.

Used in its obstetrical context, a caul is a portion of the amniotic membrane that envelopes the fetus and amniotic fluid during gestation that persists after delivery and is draped over the head of the newborn infant. Less frequently, a second membrane, the chorion, containing the blood vessels connected to the endometrium through the placenta, persists as part of the caul. Most commonly, the caul is a thin translucent portion of the amnion and is easily removed by the midwife or physician. When the amniotic membrane was draped partially or completely around the head in a male newborn, German physicians in the sixteenth century wrote that the infant was galeatus (helmeted) and if the infant was female, Italians described it as a vitta (fillet) or camisia (a shirt).

The word caul has an interesting etymologic history. Before it was given its obstetrical meaning, it was used in the world of apparel. It derives from Latin: cucullus, meaning hood or cowl. It appears in Old French as cale or calle,referring to a woman’s headdress or hood. It is found in Middle English as cale or caule,signifying a cap or tight-fitting covering for the head like a hairnet. The word caul was used as an item of fashion throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. We find it in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde of 1347: “And makyn hym a howe [hood] above a calle.”³ In in the works of Shakespeare where it appears but once, we find it clearly used as an item of fashion in The Two Gentleman of Verona from 1590:

Her hair is auburn, mine is perfect yellow:
If that be all the difference in his love,
I’ll get me such a coloured periwig or a new caul
Made of the same hair, and thus disguised,
Be like my mistress.
(The Two Gentleman of Verona, Act IV, Scene 4, line 189)

In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy of 1761, in many respects a precursor of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, it is used as a netting over the hair: “He…inserted his hand…betwixt his head and the cawl of his wig.”⁴

We can easily imagine a midwife or physician observing a thin transparent membrane covering the head of a newborn infant and likening it to a caul. The word caul used in its obstetrical context appears in medical writings from the late fourteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the English physician Andre Borde’s (c. 1490–1549) usage of the word in this sense in 1547: “A skyn or a cal in the which a child doth lie in the mothers bely.”⁵ We find it in playwright Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist of 1612: “Yes and that you were born with a caul o’ your head.”⁶ In The Midwives Book: or the Whole Art of Midwifery (1671), the English midwife Jane Sharp notes: “yet sometimes a piece of the Amnios covers the child’s face and head when he is born and women call it the caule…”⁷

The word caul appears in a manner analogous to its obstetrical use in the King James Version of the Bible (1611). In passages from the Old Testament, the Hebrew words for the membrane covering the liver yoth’reth (“something redundant”) and seghor (“an enclosure”), referring to the membrane covering the heart or pericardium, are translated with the word caul:

And thou shalt take all the fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul that is above the liver…
Exodus 29:13 King James Version, 1611

…and will rend the caul of their heart…⁸
Hosea 13:8

From medieval times forward, to be born with a caul was seen as a portent of good luck and greatness. The caul was preserved and presented to the mother as an heirloom. Early physicians scoffed at these beliefs including Cornelius Gemma (1535–1625) in the sixteenth century, Adriaan Van den Spiegel (1578–1625), a Belgian anatomist, and Charles Drelincourt (1633–1697), author of De Foetum Pileolo sive Galea (On the Little Cap or Helmet of the Fetuses). However, the English physician Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) observed: “Children that come into the world with the cawl about their head are born to good luck.”

In Germany a child is said to be born with a Glückshaube, a lucky hat, clearly conveying the idea of good fortune. The French idiom être né coiffé (born with a hat on) and the Italian idiom nato a con la camicia (born with a shirt) both describe a person who is very lucky.

Protection from drowning was one of the most widespread superstitions attributed to a caul. The origin of this belief might have been inferred from observing that the fetus was totally immersed in fluid within the amniotic membrane. The term “en-caul delivery” appears in twentieth-century obstetrical literature. It refers to an infant born with its amniotic sac intact. En-caul deliveries may occur with both vaginal and cesarian deliveries and are more likely to occur with premature births or instances of very low birth weight. Such births have also been labeled “veiled births” or “mermaid births.”⁹ The first description of an “en-caul” vaginal delivery in the medical literature was in 1975. In this instance, the infant lived for 25 minutes while still in the amniotic sac and placenta before being removed and resuscitated (by three years of age the child exhibited normal growth and development).¹⁰

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is found in the list of notable personages said to have been born with a caul. Born on May 6, 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg in the Austrian Empire, his mother, Amaila Nathonsohn, was twenty years old when she gave birth to her eldest son Sigmund (Sigismund Schlomo Freud). Her husband Jakob Freud, a wool merchant, had been married twice before and was twenty years her senior. In Ernest Jones’ acclaimed 1957 biography of Sigmund Freud, we learn that he was born with a caul and “when one day an old woman whom the young mother encountered by chance in a pastry shop fortified this by informing her that she had brought a great man into the world, the proud and happy mother believed firmly in the prediction.”¹¹ Freud, the skeptic, viewed it as the idle prophesies of “many old peasant women.” But not his mother, who gave birth to seven more children in the subsequent nine years, and idolized her eldest son referring to him as “mein goldener Sigi”—”my golden Siggie.” Ernest Jones elaborates on the effect of his mother’s pride with this quotation from Freud himself: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.” Freud’s mother died in 1930 at the age of ninety-six. She had been living with four of Freud’s sisters in Vienna, and Freud made a habit of calling on her every Sunday morning.¹²

Freud’s famous case study of Der Wolfsmann (The Wolf Man) published as Aus der Geschichte einer Infantilen Neurose (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis) in 1918,¹³ is an analysis of a Russian aristocrat, Sergei Konstantinovich Pankrejeff (1886–1979), who had also been born with a caul. Freud gave him the pseudonym Der Wolfsmann because of a terrifying dream he had as a young child wherein six or seven white wolves were sitting on a walnut tree outside his open bedroom window. Freud links the fact that Pankrejeff had been born with a caul to his feeling that the world was hidden behind a veil: “Thus the caul was the veil which hid him from the world and hid the world from him.”¹⁴ This symptom was his principal reason for seeking out Freud’s help.

In Dickens’ David Copperfield, while folklore might have deemed his hero to a life of good fortune, the author meant us to see the irony of this in the string of misfortunes his hero would experience. A short piece in the Lancet, “Copperfield’s Caul,” by Ruth Richardson questions if “in today’s obstetric departments a caul [would be] deemed worthy of comment when a child is born with one?”¹⁵ As for avoiding death by drowning, we might forget about possessing a caul and misappropriate the advice of Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B. (First Lord of the Admiralty) in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (1878):

Be careful to be guided by this golden rule. Stick close to your desks and never go to sea…¹⁶

References

1. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, 1996, p. 13.
2. Thomas R. Forbes, “The Social History of the Caul, Yale J. Biol. Med., 1953, Jun 25 (6): 495-508.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer (edited by Larry B. Benson), Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987 p. 524, Line 775.
4. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Norton Critical Edition, Volume III, Chapter XXXIII, p.160.
5. Andrew Brorde, The Brevyary of Health (1547?).
6. Ben Johnson, The Alchemist, Edited by G.E. Bentley, Appleton-Century-Crofts, NY, 1947, Act I, Scene Two.
7. The Midwives Book or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, Jane Sharp (1671, Chapter VIII of Book I.
8. The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, Oxford University Press, 1997, Exodus 29:13 p. 102.
9. Izabela Pabin et. al., En-Caul Caesarian Delivery – A Safer Way to Deliver a Premature Newborn? Narrative Review, Journal of Clinical Medicine, 2025, 15,51. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11721903/pdf/jcm-14-00051.pdf. Chia-Hui Lin et. al. Extremely Preterm Cesarian Delivery “En Caul,” Taiwan J. Obstet. Gynecol., September 2010, 49 (3): 254-259.
10. Hugh Heggarty et. al. Born in a Caul: Remarkable Survival, Am. J. Dis. Child, Aug 1975, 129:955.
11. Ernest Jones MD, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Volume I 1856 – 1900, New York Basic Books, Inc. 1953, Chapter I Origins (1856-1860).
12. Elisabeth Young-Bruehil, Anna Freud, Yale University Press, second edition, 2008, p. 32.
13. Sigmund Freud, The “Wolfman” and Other Cases, Translated by Adey Huish, Penguin Books, 2002.
14. Ina Inge, Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and life Writing, University of Michigan Press, 2023, Chapter 5 Queer Livability and Sexual Subjectivity in the Wolfman Archive.
15. Ruth Richardson, From the Medical Museum, Copperfield’s Caul, The Lancet, 359, 2209, June 22, 2002
16. Gilbert and Sullivan, The Complete Plays, W. W. Norton & Company, 1976, p. 96. K.C.B. is Knight Commander of the Order of Bath. Sir Porter’s golden rule is: “Stick close to your desks and never go to sea / And you all may be the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”