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(23 reviews)
Author: Randi Hutter Epstein
ISBN : 0393064581
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Format: PDF, EPUB
Direct download links available Free Download Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank [Hardcover] from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
From a witty, relentlessly inquisitive medical writer, an eye-opening history of pregnancy and birthing joys and debacles.
Making and having babies—what it takes to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and deliver—has mystified women and men for the whole of human history. The birth gurus of ancient times told newlyweds that simultaneous orgasms were necessary for conception and that during pregnancy a woman should drink red wine but not too much and have sex but not too frequently. Over the last one hundred years, depending on the latest prevailing advice, women have taken morphine, practiced Lamaze, relied on ultrasound images, sampled fertility drugs, and shopped at sperm banks.
In Get Me Out, the insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history, fads, and fables, and to the fringe of science, where audacious researchers have gone to extreme measures to get healthy babies out of mothers. Here is an entertaining must-read—and an enlightening celebration of human life. 22 illustrations
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank
- Hardcover: 302 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 11, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393064581
- ISBN-13: 978-0393064582
- Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 5.8 x 8.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank
This history of the last few hundred years of childbirth trends had all the makings of an irreverent romp through the messy business of baby-making. There are moments of hilarity and charm, but author Randi Epstein is smart enough to realize that much of the history of interventions in the childbearing business is built on untimely death and horrifying suffering. The curse of Eve -- by which theologians blithely assigned the pain of childbirth to the disobedience of our prodigal mother -- is a ready reality in this age of antiseptics and ultrasounds. Women still die bearing children, perhaps not as much in the industrialized world as elsewhere. But all must deal with the evolutionary tradeoff between big-headed babies and narrow birth canals that allow upright walking.
While gently mocking old trends (male doctors were once banned from actually watching childbirth and had to grope around blindly under sheets) Epstein is almost too fair when it comes to the ironies of modern childbirth trends. Those who choose elective C-sections vie with the hardy souls who insist on birthing without meds at all. The western cultural bias toward individuality in all things vies with the proven track record of medical practitioners whose experience with thousands of mothers gives them a leg up on the less experienced. Epstein is also fair about the midwife v. obstetrician controversy, acknowledging the disdain with which men looked down on women practitioners, but realizing that the midwives were hardly the font of natural knowledge that simpler histories might suggest. Epstein also bends over backward when telling of Dr. Marion Sims, the doctor who perfected techniques for repairing vaginal fistulas by injuring slave women, then sewing them up -- all without anesthetics. Was Sims a monster or a messiah?
What if we view history not by the rise and fall of empires, but through the everyday experience of childbirth through time? This is the story told in "Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank,"(W.W. Norton, $15.95 paperback) by Randi Hutter-Epstein, M.D. Witty and entertaining, the book is also encyclopedic in scope. It passes muster as a work of medical history, and at the same time, provides practical information that new mothers will find valuable.
"Get Me Out" is full of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tales. To get pregnant, Catherine de Medici, France's sixteenth-century queen, was advised to drink mare's urine, and to soak her privates in cow manure and ground stag's antlers. In nineteenth century New York, post-partum women aired out their genitals on the hospital rooftop, high above Manhattan.
The book abounds with fascinating characters. We meet England's Chamberlen family, who for 200 years beginning in the 1500's, were renowned for their ability to safely deliver babies thanks to a secret family tool--forceps. In pre-Civil War United States, surgeon Marion Sims took ten postpartum slave women into his backyard, and by gruesome experimentation on their genitals, cured one of childbirth's most horrible side effects--vaginal rips that caused women to leak urine and feces, and to thus be outcast for the rest of their lives. This disabling postpartum condition is still common in developing countries, but no longer exists in the west, thanks to the anonymous slave women, and to Dr. Sims.