For instance, Elizabeth has Catherine suck on a nail: this iron nail would have helped to introduce small amounts of iron into her body and would have helped with iron deficiencies common in pregnancy. Surprisingly, a great many of the pregnancy tricks that are included in The Great season 2 and are written off as silly and ridiculous actually have real historical applications that worked, even if the people administering them didn’t know why. The representation of Catherine in The Great season 2 as scrounging for dirt or having it brought to her by Elizabeth in a dish does a lot to juxtapose Catherine’s importance and “Great”-ness with a much baser image, hammering home larger thematic ideas. The Great season 2 sees her embody this title in a lot of ways, but also shows her failing to enact many of the things that she wishes to. In the series, Catherine has had herself crowned as empress and taken the title Catherine the Great. This demonstration of Catherine’s craving for eating dirt is not only entertaining to watch and a historically accurate representation of pregnancy experiences, but it also serves an important narrative purpose. Today, pregnant people are usually treated for the compulsion with vitamin supplements that solve the nutrient deficiency, rather than being given fancy bowls filled with dirt. A part of The Great s eason 2’s historical accuracy, in pregnant people pica is most commonly caused by a nutrient deficiency which Catherine, living in the 1700s, likely would have suffered from in some form. Pica is simply the ongoing compulsive need to eat non-food items which, depending on the items eaten and the longevity of the condition, can either be relatively harmless or have serious long-term effects. If the cravings persist beyond a month and after pregnancy, then it is considered an eating disorder called pica. However, Catherine’s craving for dirt in The Great season 2, though not explained, is a not-uncommon side effect of pregnancy. Related: The Great: Did Pugachev Really Impersonate Catherine's Husband, Peter? This progresses over the following episodes and Elizabeth’s (Belinda Bromilow) friendship to Catherine is shown through her delivering dirt to her on a platter. It is first introduced in The Great season 2, episode 1 “Heads It’s Me,” and one scene shows Catherine surreptitiously scraping dirt from the edge of her tent. The motivation behind Catherine’s actions often isn’t immediately clear, but when Catherine eats dirt it is never really explained. Our findings show that soil-eating is more than just a physiologically induced behaviour it is a rich cultural practice.The Great season 2 picks up four months after the end of season 1 with Catherine (Elle Fanning) notably pregnant and the season covers the months up to the birth of Paul and beyond. The cultural associations of soil-eating with blood, fertility and femininity exist alongside knowledge of its links to illness. The women's ideas about soil-eating and their bodies shows the significance of both social and cultural context on the ways in which women derive knowledge from, and make sense of their bodily states. Instead, they acknowledged the existence of multiple links between phenomena which they observed in their own and other women's bodies. However the women did not conceptualise the issue in terms of the single causal links characteristic of most scientific thought. The relationships the women described between soil-eating and illness resemble to some extent the causalities explored in biomedical research on soil-eating, anaemia and intestinal worm infections. They made associations between soil-eating, the condition of the blood and certain bodily states: pregnancy, lack of blood (upungufu wa damu), an illness called safura involving "weak" blood, and worms (minyolo). They described soil-eating as a predominantly female practice with strong relations to fertility and reproduction. They mainly ate the soil from walls of houses, and their estimated median daily ingestion was 41.5 g. Most of the pregnant women (73%) ate soil regularly. The findings were substantiated by results from an earlier anthropological study on maternal health and anaemia in the same study area. After a clinical study at Kilifi District hospital had shown a high prevalence of geophagy among pregnant women, and a strong association of geophagy, anaemia and iron depletion, 52 pregnant women from the same hospital, and 4 traditional healers from the surroundings of Kilifi in Kenya were interviewed on the topic of soil-eating and its perceived causes and consequences.
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