Preprint Articles

At the turn of the twentieth century, in the midst of a shift in obstetrical research toward physiology, German obstetrician Hugo Sellheim (1871–1936) embarked upon a research project on the laws of birth mechanics. In a comprehensive experimental program, centering on the internal rotation of fetuses during birth, he tried to find out what kind of mechanical and expulsive forces were at work in the birthing process. From these experiments emerged a wealth of objects such as anatomical models, mechanical dolls, measuring devices, new physical instruments, and also birthing machines. By paying close attention to these objects and the sociomaterial practices associated with them, this article identifies, tracks, and characterizes the shift to physiology in obstetrics. By adopting a historical-praxiographic method, the article reveals the entanglement between the social and the material and renders visible a new and wider set of actors and relationships that, in turn, adds a novel dimension to the historiography of obstetrics.

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.

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.