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place separately and Hie two are then clamped together. By pulling upon the. forceps, the obstetrician hastens delivery,The use of forceps is indicated when the mother lacks the necessary propulsive force or when some condition makes it advisable to terminate labor quickly. It was supposed, in Chamberlen’s day, that every mother could be delivered by the. use of forceps, but it is now known that such is not the case. In' Chamberlen’? day it was supposed that the bones of the pelvis separated making possible the passage of the baby’s head. It is now known that the pelvic ring is tightly knit together. If the, baby’s head is too large, a Caesarian section must be resorted to.The Chamberlen brothers committed the sin which is contrary to all medical ethics. They kept their forceps a secret. True medical men make any discovery available to the whole world. For four generations the forceps were known to the family only but the Chamberlen of the fourth generation permitted , the secret to leak out.The fifth great contribution, to progress was cleanliness, or as it is called today, asepsis. It was this which turned hospitals from houses of death to houses of life. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the lying-in hospitals of Europe were centers of infection. One-fifth' of all the women who entered them died of.puerperal fever. This' condition, resembling what is commonly called blood poisoning, is now known to be due to the introduction of infection intothe birth passages at the time of delivery.Holmes Pointed WayIT was Oliver Wendell Holmes,better remembered todav as an author than as a physician, who first preaehe$ the connection between puerperal fever and dirty hands. In 1843 he read a paper before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement on “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” But his ideas met with violent opposition. It must be remembered that this was before Pasteur had established the germ theory of disease.Four years later, a Hungarian physician, Dr. Ignatz Phillip Semmelweiss, without ever having heard of the paper by Holmes, came to the sa,pne conclusion. Seminelweiss deserves immortal glory because he spent the rest of his life in a battle to prove that he was right.In his day, it was common fordoctors and medical students to go from the dissecting room to the maternity ward without stopping to wash their hands. Semmelweiss put a stop to that practice in the division of the lying-in hospital in Viennawhich was under his direction in 1847. At. once, : cases of infection fell off. As he instituted more stringent rules, forcing the medical men to wash their hands between the examination of patients as well as upon entry to.the hospital, cases of infection became fewer and fewer. But Semmelweiss only made enemies and eventually lost his post. In theenlt;werdkbo.haonquree4seigrimlt;stedutioca;ev“IVj.meallth«US'foihisreirinciaheTherwereirwi,emaleju'cerferst
Newspaper Details
El Paso Herald Post
El Paso, Texas, US
Tue, Sep 28, 1937
Page 12
Full Page
Clipped by
Raul M.
NA, 24 May 2022
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