Birthing Machines and the Turn to Physiology in Twentieth Century Obstetrics

Since the eighteenth century, childbirth in Western medicine has been understood as a mechanical procedure consisting of a regular sequence of foetal movements through the mother’s womb. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the reasons for these movements were not yet understood. What kind of mechanical and expulsive forces were at work in the birthing process? At the turn of the twentieth century, German obstetrician Hugo Sellheim (1871–1936) embarked upon a research project to answer this question by exploring the laws of birth mechanics. For his experimental studies, he designed new research tools, so-called “birthing machines”. In contrast to older obstetrical machines, these “machines” performed the birth process not along anatomical lines but, rather, simulated it from a strictly functional-mechanical perspective. The paper argues that studying these machines offers an excellent lens to examine the epistemic shifts that obstetrics underwent in the early twentieth century, when it moved from an anatomical to a physiological paradigm, leaving the focus on the pelvis-skull ratio behind, instead studying the impact of mechanical laws on soft tissues and its flexibility. Sellheim aimed at establishing a norm, a standard procedure of delivery based on experimental, scientific knowledge that also captured all of its possible deviations, turning treatments from improvised and experience-based interventions into standards based on scientific norms. I analyze Sellheim’s experimental system from a material-semiotics perspective to show how these objects and epistemic shifts more generally were always entangled in practices imbued with gender and class politics.