Browsing all posts in "forceps".

Whigs, Tories, Forceps and Crisis

Once the secret of the forceps was out, everybody could use them. But not everybody did. The older, established gentry among the man-midwives (medical degree or no) noted that there were occasional bad outcomes from the forceps–crushed skulls to the fetus, massive tearing to the mothers. The more conservative simply did not use them. William [...]

The Family Business of the Forceps

Before the seventeenth century, when a baby wouldn’t come out, your choices were limited. Since antiquity, the preferred method of dealing with a stalled labor was podalic version. Most midwives, we think, could perform podalic version, in which the baby was turned from head-down to foot-down. This gave the deliverer something to grab onto. Various [...]

Algebra, Alchemy and Albucasis

Before we reenter European obstetrics, where the Dark Ages were being swept away  by rays of sunlight from the Arab world, we should take a moment to visit the infidels and find out just how much they actually knew about science and medicine. The Islamic world was, at the time, a hotbed of scientific research. [...]