Gregory's ServerYou may be reading this and wondering "Surely this isn't an elaborate centrifuge designed to make the baby fly out? Surely?"
That's exactly what it is (and stop calling us Shirley).
|
86 comments
As is the format for patent documentation, George B and Charlotte E Blosnky begin by explaining why the world needs a birth centrifuge. Apparently the foetus needs "considerable propelling force" to leave the body. The Blonskys say that "Primitive peoples" have the muscle and skeletal system to supply this while "Civilized Women" do not, so it's a racist birth centrifuge, too.  Okay I was enjoying this thread immensely and barely holding in a lot of laughs but this comment was the final straw and I can't stop giggling. The way the contraption is supposed to work is this: "When the gynecologist decides that the most opportune time for childbirth has arrived", you are strapped supine to a stretcher at the head, legs and feet. The stretcher is then loaded up into the centrifuge. It then gets spun round and round at an alarming speed until the baby comes out. @vagina_museum ETA: I suppose it's too much to hope that they provided supporting evidence for the 2-8G estimates (like 'We evaluated the velocity of newborns in our ideal target group and identified that the average baby entered the world between 20 and 78 m/s. Also, midwives in Category A wear modified baseball gloves').  @violet @vagina_museum The Blonskys are cagey about the appropriate speed at which a foetus would be "dislodged" (their word). At one point they mention around 8gs, then conclude that would probably be a bit much and suggest starting at around 2gs and going up from there. In a supine position, a human would black out with in a few minutes at 2gs, and quicker at a faster speed. The Blonskys are well aware of this, and that the birth will have to be achieved by centrifuging alone. Now, they're probably cagey about the appropriate speed at which to spin a baby out straight out of a uterus because this science has never been tested. In fact, it's hard to find any data as to whether g-forces even *can* make anything shoot out of the pelvis. To prove or refute the concept of the birth centrifuge, can any astronauts, pilots or others who have had high-g training tell us if they let out a bit of wee or poo when you were in the centrifuge? You might be worrying what happens to the baby once sufficient centrifugal force is applied. Don't worry, it doesn't go flying across the room! There's a net to catch it. There's even a little bit of cotton wadding to prevent it being slammed into any machinery. The net still raises unpleasant questions as a newborn baby's skull bones aren't fused yet so being accelerated into a net probably isn't good for its head. Also, the Blonskys don't tell us what's supposed to happen to the placenta. Does it slam straight into the baby from behind? According to the story behind their design, the Blonskys - husband and wife - had visited the zoo and seen an elephant twirling in circles. A zookeeper explained to them elephants do this before giving birth. Which, by the way, they don't, because centrifugal force isn't necessary for birth. If the Apparatus For Facilitating The Birth Of A Child By Centrifugal Force was in fact some clever piece of art critiquing medicalisation of birth, then the Blonskys played a blinder, as the patent documentation is delivered entirely straight-faced and with huge attention to detail. You can enjoy the full technical specifications of the birth centrifuge here https://patents.google.com/patent/US3216423A/en Unsurprisingly, the birth centrifuge never went into production. The achievements of the Blonskys were recognised in 1999 with a posthumous Ig Nobel Prize for Managed Health Care.  @vagina_museum I notice that the Dublin Science Gallery built a version of this for their ‘Fail Better’ exhibition: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/failbetter Perhaps their recreation of the Blonsky device could be acquired by the Vagina Museum 😊  @vagina_museum My only explanation for the elephant part of this story is that the poor thing displayed stress behavior caused by the facilities.  @vagina_museum Like Raspberry awards for movies...  @vagina_museum i wonder if it's coincidence that a few years later Heinlein described childbirth on a spaceship being assisted by a well-timed sudden increase in the artificial gravity field. (The birthing position was not supine though.) I'm sure he was trying to be helpful or modern or something, but, oh my. Of course this was Time Enough For Love and it was probably one of the less-problematic things in it for a modern reader. I'm guessing because I don't dare read it again in this century… @vagina_museum I got pretty far without cracking up, but the net and the attached visualization got me good. @vagina_museum I wonder if this is where Heinlein got the idea that he used in one of the sections of Time Enough for Love ? @vagina_museum I can’t be the only one sitting here going don’t let the GOP find out about this, they’ll make it mandatory in all hospitals 😬 @LetsBuild @vagina_museum was just thinking this, with hospitals losing doctors cause of abortion laws making it harder to treat pregnant women. @Burn_this_ @vagina_museum @vagina_museum looks like the creators didn't spend a second thinking about cleaning that thing after use.  @vagina_museum  @vagina_museum Having been present for the birth of my child, and seeing my ex suddenly stand and squat to give birth, I can say that gravity does help a bit. But I'm not sure the intersection between "using centrifugal force" and "safe birth" exists. @angusm @vagina_museum @cstross I do not believe I am alone in saying that centripetally launching babies into space is not the galaxy-colonizing future we were promised. @richie @vagina_museum @cstross I do not believe I am alone in saying that I have sometimes met babies that I would like to see launched into space. @vagina_museum@masto.ai Wondering if they came out with the idea when trying to take out a stuck asparagus (e.g.) from the can by spining on themselves...  @vagina_museum The Blonskys clearly deserve an award for [Reproductive] Mad Science! Because that is the most deranged pseudo-medical contraption I've heard of from the past century.  @cstross @vagina_museum now I'm thinking how messy a birth in zero g would be.... @vagina_museum the similarities in this and spin launch's design are so much so that I'm almost certain their engineers or lawyers found this patient. Talk about reapplying technologies to different applications. 🤣  @vagina_museum how do they propose to decelerate the new arrival at the end of this procedure? @simon_brooke @vagina_museum I bet it's a fast runner with a big fishing net. I betcha  Such a machine would be also perfect to squeeze the last drop of ketchup from the bottle 😄  @vagina_museum Among the many crazy things about this we should note that forcing blood into to the lower half of the body would be a great way to kill women should they hemorrhage  @vagina_museum I was not expecting to start the day with the phrase "racist birth centrifuge" but here we are. Thank you for that. :) @vagina_museum I should not be surprised, but honestly "racist birth centrifuge" is not a combination of words one can really prepare to see.  @vagina_museum This is the poster child example that you can just patent about anything as long as you comply with novelty and inventive step, but don't expect people to adopt it.  |
@vagina_museum
Please tell me Charlotte tried this out 😭
👶💨