Tag: Birth Pregnancy & Obstetrics
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Doctoring while pregnant
Katie TaylorOakland, California, United States “Are you sexually active?” “No, but you are,” a patient, one day in early spring, responds. Her timing is good, and the point is obvious. I am twenty weeks pregnant and showing, belly at two-thirds basketball. When I tell an older male patient I’m pregnant, he congratulates me, tells me…
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Israel Spach the biographer and the Lithopedion of Sens
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Israel Spach (Israele Spachio, Spachius) (1569–1610), was raised and studied in Strasbourg and later in Paris under Jean Riolan the Elder.1 He finished his medical studies at the University of Tübingen under Andreas Planer in 1581.2 In 1589 he returned to Strasbourg, where he married3 and lived until his death. The…
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The history of the C-section
Julius BonelloAjoke IrominiPeoria, Illinois, United States A procedure that removes a live fetus through an abdominal incision in a pregnant woman is known as a Cesarean section or C-section. Its original intention was to remove a dead baby from a dying or dead mother. Therefore, Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) was not delivered by Cesarean Section…
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Surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, and pain
Jayant RadhakrishnanChicago, Illinois, United States Pain caused by surgical interventions is incorrectly considered an unimportant, self-limiting inconvenience. “Let them scream—it is a relief of nature,” said Benjamin Winslow Dudley, a professor of anatomy, surgery and medicine at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky from 1817 to 1850. If Dudley’s unanesthetized patients squirmed during an operation, he would…
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Ian Donald: Ultrasound pioneer
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Ian Donald was born in Liskeard, Cornwall, UK in 1910 of Scottish ancestry. His father was a general practitioner. He was educated in Scotland at Fettes College and spent a brief period in South Africa from 1925 to 1930, where he studied for a BA degree in Cape Town, before entering…
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Credé’s maneuver
Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Carl Siegmund Franz Credé (1819–1892) was a German gynecologist and obstetrician born in Berlin. In 1852, he became director of the Berlin School of Midwives and head of the maternity division of the Berlin Charité Hospital. Later, he moved to Leipzig. Credé is known for the Credé maneuver, a technique to…
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Labor of love
Mary OakSeattle, Washington, USA Each week my elderly father and I watch babies being born. In the silver-shadowed flickers of a television, we sit as we often did in my childhood. Now in the spectral shade of his decelerated years, I care for him. He spends a lot of time watching TV. I join him…