(This post was written by Lara Musser.)
From now until November 1, 2019, Historical Collections at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library is featuring a new exhibit in the main lobby: “Assistants to Nature: Midwives, Obstetrics, and the Medical Turn.” The exhibit highlights some of the Library’s collection of obstetrics literature and artifacts as it takes patrons through the history of what has historically been one of life’s most perilous experiences--birth--and offers a glimpse of the medical women and men of Western history, and the advances and pitfalls, that paved the way for the field of obstetrics that we recognize today.
Before the obstetrician and the hospital delivery, there were the midwives, attendants upon birth since time immemorial. For the majority of Western medical history, women’s health was managed by a community of other women, trained informally through apprenticeship, who attended to birth and parturition with natural remedies and, out of necessity, minimal intervention. This exhibit considers the historical moments in which men entered a field which had been, as patients and as practitioners, the exclusive purview of women. The shift from locally oriented midwifery to professional, institutionalized obstetrics is marked by a number of tensions, between masculine and feminine, sacred and profane, and most distinctly, nature and art.
In the heated debate that emerged in the early 18th century regarding which practitioners ought to have dominion over women’s medicine, and in which manner, history poses an enduring scientific and medical question: does Nature know best? How did the medical attendant know whether to trust to the process of Nature, or whether to intervene with it? Out of this question rose a cultural heuristic: to the one side the midwife, licensed by her “natural” aptitude as a woman and her practical knowledge; to the other the “man-midwife,” “accoucher,” or the obstetrician, distinguished by his anatomical knowledge and his surgical instruments. The struggle between these two schools of practice provoked a number of questions: Who had authority over the labors of the female body? Whose ministrations helped? And whose hurt?
One of the focal points of this medical shift was the 18th century development of a familiar medical device: the obstetric forceps. Visitors can examine forceps from Library’s collections and see images from obstetrics literature of how 18th and 19th century practitioners would have been taught to use this sensational new instrument. Also featured in the exhibit are historical texts and examples of anatomical teaching tools from the Library’s collections.
The exhibit was designed and written by Lara Musser, PhD, Historical Collections Graduate Assistant in 2018.
(This article was written by Elaine Attridge, and edited by Kimberley Barker)
For over 20 years, PubMed has been there for you by providing an easy-to-use interface to find articles on the topics in which you’re interested. Updates have been made periodically including in 2017, when a new search algorithm was implemented that uses machine learning to locate the “best matches” of top articles for the terms you’re searching. Top articles now are weighted by term frequency and by using relevancy data obtained from anonymous PubMed search logs that were aggregated over a period of time.
Get ready for another change that should occur sometime between September 2019 and January 2020. Once this version of PubMed is live, you will notice a new, modern interface that works better on mobile devices. It will be easier to perform your search, to show the most relevant articles first, to read snippets of the abstract in which the terms you used are highlighted, which makes reading articles much simpler. A handy graph prominently displays how often your term(s) have been written about over the years so that you have a sense of how far back in the literature you should look.
Other new features include a limit to connect you to “Associated data” from each article. “Cite” provides the reference in AMA, APA or MLA formats for use in bibliographies. And the “Share” feature easily links your citation to Facebook, Twitter, or provides a permanent link to the citation that you can email to others.
For more savvy searchers, the advanced search allows for search term building within specific fields such as Medical Subject headings (MeSH), the title/abstract, and more. Those with a NCBI account will continue to be able to use it but with the new PubMed, one can create an alert using a Google or eRA Commons account, too.
Want to get a look before it’s live? Click here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pubmed/. This experimental site, called PubMed Labs, is not yet fully functional and does not include all of the information that it will, such as the complete MEDLINE database. PubMed Labs is intended to be a test site for new features and to give users a peak before it goes live.
If you have questions about the coming PubMed update, please email Elaine Attridge: Elaine@virginia.edu