"How to undo the pelvis: Hugo Sellheim’s experimental obstetrical research and the enactment of a new birthing body"
By: Martina Schlünder, research scholar Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
At the turn of the twentieth century, German obstetrician Hugo Sellheim (1871-1936) embarked upon a research project on the laws of birth mechanics. In a comprehensive experimental program, he tried to find out what kind of mechanical and expulsive forces were at work in the birthing process. In my presentation I argue that studying Sellheim’s experimental practices 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 thought style, leaving the focus on the pelvis-skull ratio behind, instead studying the impact of mechanical laws on soft tissues, its content of water and thus its flexibility. Through Sellheim’s extensive experimental work new tools like birthing objects and machines as well as new concepts came into being, and at the end a new birthing body emerged not defined by the anatomy of mother and child, rather composed and defined by a set of mechanical forces. Sellheim aimed at establishing a new norm, a physiological, 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 perspective of sociomateriality (aka relational ontology or praxeography), which emphasizes the world-making capacities of (scientific) practices. Thus, matter e.g. obstetrical tools and bodies are not understood as given, they are effects of practices and emerge and disappear with their respective practices that enact them.
Martina Schlünder (MD/PhD) is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany) with a research focus on the history of the life science, medicine and the technoscientific turn in the history of reproduction in the 20th and 21st centuries.