 When was the earliest childbirth simulator developed?
Obstetrics for beginners It's my first go at delivering a baby by caesarean section – and the foetal head is impacted, jammed in its mother's pelvis. Incisions have been made in the lower part of the mother's abdomen and womb. Debra – Desperate Debra to use her full trade name – is a simulator designed to help doctors practise their skill at dealing with impacted foetuses: babies that get stuck trying to exit the womb by the normal route. She comes with a vulva, a pre-cut incision in her abdomen and, most importantly, a uterus containing a foetal head that should, in the normal way of things, be free to emerge between her legs. The clever and sophisticated simulator I'm playing with started life as a lash-up in an obstetrician's home workshop: a Heath Robinson-style contraption barely recognisable as a model of the human body. Its sole purpose was to test the effectiveness of a novel device called a Tydeman tube. Every year some 160,000 babies are born in the UK this way, with almost two thirds of them classified as emergencies. One audit has suggested that roughly 8,000 babies get stuck and have to be delivered by caesarean at a stage when their mothers are fully dilated. "Some of the babies will be so close to coming out by the normal route," says Tydeman, "that it's then difficult to get them back up and remove them through the hole in the woman's tummy."
 Sometime in the eighteenth century
 Sometime in the fourth century  Sometime in the eighteenth century  Sometime in the thirteenth century  Sometime in the first century