Sink or Swim: Training to Be an Obstetrician

Abstract

June 14,1928, my first obstetric delivery! In my just-completed second year at Harvard Medical School, the training had included only 12 lectures in obstetrics from Chubby Newell and an intense study of a mimeographed syllabus that might have been titled How to Deliver a Baby. I had reported to the Boston Lying-In Hospital's headquarters along with two classmates whose ignorance equaled mine, each of us armed with his self-prepared bag of instruments, gloves, cotton, and pans for sterilization by boiling water on the kitchen stove. For medication we each had an ounce of fluid extract of ergot that was replaced daily from the hospital with a freshly prepared supply. The patients had all been screened by the lordly interns who conducted the hospital's prenatal clinics, and the women, mostly multiparas, lived all over the eastern suburbs. When a telephone call came into the district headquarters, one of us would