This, my friends, is a "Nottaufspritze", or "syringe for emergency baptism".
If the midwife strongly suspected that the child would be stillborn, and could not see the child's head, she could inject the syringe into the vagina, and thus sprinkle the child with holy water and provide an emergency baptism before the stillborn child was formally dead.
Because the souls of unbaptized children don't go into Heaven.
#TIL #history #Christianity #baptism
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nottaufspritze_MfK_Wgt.jpg
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