History
Prior to the arrival of C/S the fetus usually died during protracted labor and the mother's life was at risk as well due to infection, uterine rupture and bleeding. On occasion, if the baby was macerated and small, it collapsed sufficiently to be delivered. The shoulder presentation was a feared obstetrical complication.
In 1690 Justine Siegemundin, a German midwife, published Die Kgl. Preußische und Chur-Brandenburgische Hof-Wehemutter. This treatise for midwives demonstrated abnormal presentations at birth and their management. She was the first to describe a two-handed method of performing an internal rotation of the baby to extract it as a breech (a variation of which is performed today on the second twin, see above) using a sling. The procedure was useful provided the fetus was not impacted. Once the uterus had contracted around the baby tightly, destructive interventions were used to save the life of the mother.
Read more about this topic: Shoulder Presentation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)