 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. 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. 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." In a protracted birth that's destined to end with a caesarean, the longer the labour is allowed to go on before the obstetrician decides to intervene, the greater the likelihood that the baby's head will become impacted. However, concern over the rising number of babies born by caesarean has made doctors more wary of doing them – one consequence of which is that medical staff may allow a difficult birth to continue for longer before they resort to surgery. When obstetricians doing planned caesareans slice open a mother's womb, what they usually see is the baby's head.
 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