{"title":"Constructing <i>Centimeters</i>: Emanuel Friedman's Cervimeter and the Dilatation-Time Curve.","authors":"Rebecca L Jackson","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963726","DOIUrl":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963726","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 1954 Emanuel Friedman created a new dimension for measuring labor-change in dilatation rate over time-allowing the birthing body to participate in defining what it meant for labor to be \"arrested.\" Yet in constructing a \"normal\" standard curve of dilatation-over-time for guiding labor decisions and constructing a measuring instrument (the \"cervimeter\") to evidence the shape of this curve, Friedman unintentionally enabled a new dimension of labor to emerge: centimeters of dilation, today read as the state of labor progress. This article examines an oral interview with Friedman, the raw data from his first study, and his published research to show how the cervimeter reified centimeters as an \"objectively\" measurable interval-scale unit (rather than representing an ordinal approximation felt by hand) and enabled the transformation of Fried-man's curve from a graphical tool meant to conform to women into a tool used to conform them.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"51-93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7617911/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Absolute Necessity\": The Discovery of the Fetal Heartbeat with the Stethoscope, and Its Impact on Obstetric Practice in Dublin and Edinburgh, 1820-1840.","authors":"Caroline Avery","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963725","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Many people now take knowledge of the fetal heartbeat for granted. Despite this, it wasn't until 1818, following the invention of the stethoscope and popularization of the technique of auscultation, that the fetal heartbeat was first discovered. Listening to the fetal heartbeat enabled practitioners to confirm the existence of pregnancy, gain information on the internal positions of the fetus and the placenta, and determine the life or death of the fetus in utero. Additionally, signs from the stethoscope provided guidance for practitioners when dealing with long or difficult labors. This article examines the work and writings of the early key players in this story, emphasizing the impact of enthusiastic stethoscope advocacy on Irish obstetric practitioners' uptake of the instrument and how the changes in practice that stemmed from these changes went on to impact practitioners in Scotland.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"17-50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Books Received.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963738","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"285"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Sometimes the Yoni Is Like a Jasmine Flower\": The Vayattati's Hands in Twentieth-Century Kerala.","authors":"Aparna Nair","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963730","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, the author relies on oral histories from vayattatis who worked in southwestern India over the course of the twentieth century and on archival research to examine the techniques and technologies that have been and continue to be a part of both pre- and postpartum care in southern India. The author tracks the wider social contexts and histories of this figure and examines how they came to learn, develop, and adapt their techniques of care for women and children through the generations. The author also examines how they constructed their corpus of authoritative knowledge as a necessary antidote to what they perceived as both the inaccessibility and technicism of biomedicine. The article also presents the vayattatis' own critique of technoscientific modernities and the toll they took on women's bodies. The article also examines how the vayattatis used unique local techniques including massage to facilitate postpartum healing and recovery.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"185-210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time, Productivity, and Race in Plantation Management and Medicine.","authors":"Liana DeMarco","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a968649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a968649","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>By the mid-nineteenth century, plantation enslavers in Louisiana and Cuba had developed a new form of plantation management. Clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and the scientific authority of numbers, as filtered through accounting technologies like the plantation ledger, helped planters see enslaved people's health in seemingly precise terms of time, productivity, and race. In this cruelly meticulous system, some elite physicians saw a potential scientific foundation for medicine. Using plantation business records, agricultural trade periodicals, physician correspondence, medical publications, and memoirs, this article examines plantation management of enslaved health; physician appreciation of its quantitative, supposedly rigorous methods; and the intersections of management science and racial science in physician writing, where there were noticeable differences between Louisiana and Cuba. Physicians in both places believed that, under judicious management, Black people's bodies were naturally inclined to productivity, but in Cuba, there were different degrees of Blackness that needed to be taken into consideration.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 2","pages":"287-315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144979640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Re)producing Reproduction: Obstetrical Training Models and Methods, 1880-1900.","authors":"Jessica M Dandona","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a963732","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article presents a close look at the material and visual culture of obstetrical training in the late nineteenth-century North Atlantic world, focusing on the obstetrical machines employed in contemporary midwifery courses. Created during a time of growing interest in public health, widespread anxiety over rising infant mortality, and emerging pronatalist policies, these widely produced pedagogical objects provided an interactive, mechanistic, and process-oriented simulacrum of the birthing body. By the late nineteenth century, obstetrical machines, once purpose-built by individual midwives, were mass-produced using durable commercial materials. This article focuses on the Budin-Pinard manikin, a widely used obstetrical manikin designed in France by renowned obstetricians Pierre Budin and Adolphe Pinard, to illustrate that objects used in obstetrical teaching in this period sought to provide a consistent structure, and through that a framework of method and of practice, within which the unexpected could be accommodated, managed, and made to signify.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"236-273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Other Things and Apparatuses\": Abortion Techniques and Technologies in Pre-<i>Roe</i> South Carolina.","authors":"Cara Delay, Madeleine Ware, Beth Sundstrom","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963731","DOIUrl":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a963731","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article centers the methods and materials of illegal abortion in South Carolina from criminalization (1883) to Roe v. Wade (1973) as they appeared in criminal trial records, coroners' reports, newspaper accounts, oral histories, and contemporary medical literature. The authors explore abortion techniques and technologies by analyzing the objects used in criminal abortion attempts. In particular, they focus on the common objects and substances that could be found in homes or local shops, such as herbs and emmenagogues, turpentine, and rubber tubing, which are medical technologies and obstetrical objects. The analysis of illegal abortions in pre-Roe South Carolina demonstrates that abortion providers, and especially Black laywomen providers, not only depended on but actively nurtured centuries of intergenerational knowledge of abortion techniques and tools. Furthermore, they innovated with everyday objects and professional instruments alike to provide abortions to Black and white women.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 1","pages":"211-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144576940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Human Genetics with Global Aspirations: Inventing Community Genetics within and beyond the World Health Organization (1960s-2000s).","authors":"Lucile Ruault, Claire Beaudevin, Jean-Paul Gaudilliére","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a968652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a968652","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The lack of investment in noninfectious diseases by international health organizations after World War II is an understudied topic. By examining the global trajectory of hereditary and congenital disorders within and beyond the WHO, the authors provide insight into the reasons for this failure to invest in noncommunicable diseases management. In the 1970s, a network of geneticists, physicians, and WHO officials aimed to address the most frequent hereditary disorders, notably thalassemia, by putting them on the organization's agenda. However, despite significant epidemiological stakes, community genetics did not expand globally. The paper examines how Global South instantiations have reshaped aspirations for Southern alternatives to medical genetics as it had developed in the Global North. It also emphasizes the importance of analyzing new discursive activities in the field of global health and the characteristics and practical implications of these global aspirations, such as program funding, design, and operation.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 2","pages":"385-416"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144979597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erratum.","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a968658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a968658","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 2","pages":"428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144979629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conceiving Monsters: Women, Knowledge, and Anomalous Births in the Nineteenth-Century United States.","authors":"Miriam Rich","doi":"10.1353/bhm.2025.a968650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2025.a968650","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay examines historical case literature on \"monstrous births,\" revealing how childbearing women both participated in and were excluded from processes of medical knowledge-making. In the nineteenth-century United States, physicians studied newborns with major anatomical differences as \"medical specimens of monstrosity,\" asserting a singular authority over knowledge of bodies and reproduction. However, this essay shows that in practice medical knowledge-making entailed an interactive, socially embedded process that intimately engaged laywomen's perceptions, ideas, and understanding. By narrating and interpreting their lived experiences of pregnancy, women participated in determining the causes and meanings of anomalous births-even as hierarchies of gender, race, class, and citizenship conditioned and constrained this participation. Through an imaginative reading of case reports, this essay foregrounds the significance of diverse laywomen's social, affective, and embodied lives in historical practices of medical meaning-making. At the same time, it offers insight into how predominantly white male medical professionals increasingly sought to establish authority over women's reproduction.</p>","PeriodicalId":55304,"journal":{"name":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine","volume":"99 2","pages":"316-346"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144979549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}