Birth Story

My children are 10 years apart in age, and one thing that has struck me since Maeve's birth almost 13 years ago is how much more complicated the world grows as they get older.

When children are small, you can see clearly how their perfect lives will roll out. You can see them graduating from Harvard — or perhaps Yale; you devote serious time to considering which would be better — going into law or medicine, gliding along until they finish up as President of the United States. Along the way, of course, there will be sports trophies, prom dresses, all the trimmings.

Reality sets in gradually. It turns out the kids have learning disabilities, or strange hair, or no interest in sports — whatever, and likely in multiples. Ten years or so after spinning all those perfect dreams, you might find yourself praying they'll finish high school. Or even, please, God, let them stay alive through high school.

When Maeve was in preschool, I remember sitting in a group listening to moms in the Harvard vs. Yale stage, while my mind was on the then-exotic sensation some teen-aged boys in Nora's vast social network had created by sending nude pictures of girls they had probably known since kindergarten out across the Internet. I remember thinking that perhaps I had seen some of those boys, and those girls, on swings in the park or at a library reading hour when they too were small.

What I mean to say is that many of the things that seem critical when children are little get put firmly in perspective as they grow.

Poking around Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog on the New York Times website this week, I landed on a post called "A Breast-Feeding Guru Who Uses Formula," which attracted me because I have been writing about breast-feeding. Through Belkin, I discovered Katie Allison Granju and her mamapundit blog. (I know, where have I been?)

Granju is a writer and digital-media expert who has become an authority on breast-feeding. Nevertheless, she found with her fifth child, Georgia, now seven weeks old, that she was unable to breast-feed. "I did have colostrum for the first week or two, but I never got the full enchilada," she writes in a post on Babble.com.

She tried "pumping, herbs, supplemental nursing system, plenty of skin to skin with baby, nursing on demand, nipple shields," all to no avail.

She is "resigned" now to the fact that Georgia is a bottle-fed baby, and she does what she can to inject warmth and meaning into an experience she never expected a child of hers to have.

But Granju believes that a horrific recent event in her life has contributed to her inability to breast-feed.

"I suspect that the biggest factor in my inability to produce milk at the moment is that my oldest child died in my arms only a few weeks before G was born. God only knows what the shock of that experience did to my body and its normal functioning," she wrote.

The death of Granju's son Henry from a drug overdose is about as terrible as this world gets. We dream for our children but they live the lives we give them. My heart goes out to the Granjus.

New mom Gisele Bundchen touched off a firestorm of criticism when she told the British edition of Harper's Bazaar that mothers around the world should be required by law to breast-feed for six months.

Gisele Bundchen

Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan called Bundchen "a silly twit." Mark Marino, writing on CNN Entertainment's Marquee Blog, ventured that the 30-year-old Brazilian-born supermodel "might have made a boob of herself," based on responses from indignant readers of the blog.

Those included one woman identified as "Angela," who said that having "just popped out a kid" seemed to have given Bundchen the idea she "knows what's best for children and mothers."

Eagan admitted that her "catty little heart leaps with joy" to see a woman so "lucky in looks, in love, in life" whose "perfect foot" keeps finding its way into her "perfect pouty mouth," first touting her painless home birth eight months ago, now with her pronouncement that everyone should be legally required to breast-feed. And in that, Eagan probably stands in for a great many of us who can't help but notice that Bundchen's life is not exactly lived in the trenches.

Bundchen did back down from her provocative statement, writing in her blog, "I am not here to judge.... I think as mothers we are all just trying our best."

Of her backtracking, Eagan wrote, "Too late! Too late!"

But here's the thing. Bundchen has a right to her opinion (she did say it was her opinion), and she is in a position where people ask her her opinion and then print it up in glossy magazines.

Here's another thing: She's not wrong. She's not saying parents should hang their kids out the window by their heels; she's saying every mother should breast-feed for six months.

Sure, plenty of women can't breast-feed, others simply don't want to, and working mothers in this country, at least, have to be highly motivated to keep it up for any length of time. And the logistics — and the politics — of enacting a "worldwide law" mandating six months of breast-feeding for every baby make it, let's say, unlikely.

However, the health benefits of breast-feeding are well documented. The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics join Bundchen in recommending that infants be breast-fed exclusively for at least six months. The AAP suggests mothers continue to breast-feed, even as a baby begins to eat other foods, for at least a year in all; the WHO recommends two years or more.

"Breast-feeding can decrease the incidence or severity of conditions such as diarrhea, ear infections and bacterial meningitis. Some studies also suggest that breast-feeding may offer protection against sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), diabetes, obesity and asthma among others (conditions)," the AAP stated in its 2005 position on breast-feeding.

Researchers recently teased out some of the specifics of the good things breast-feeding does for babies, concluding that breast-feeding represents "an intriguing strategy" to maximize an infant's chances for survival.

But breast-feeding still gets a bad rap from a squeamish public, and even, down in those trenches, from doctors.

"It is tragic that a supermodel-mom dispenses better advice than many doctors and most governmental agencies," wrote pediatrician/author Jay Gordon MD on the Huffington Post. "We must listen if her advice and high profile can save babies' lives."

Lastly, I must say that the world is full of women who think that the fact that they popped out a kid or two makes them experts on parenting. Just usually not as big an expert as people who have never popped out a kid.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Bernard Fantus, the Hungarian-born physician who was the director of "therapeutics" at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Ill., established the first "blood bank" in 1937.

Until then, a donor had to be on-site at the time of a blood transfusion.

Bernard Fantus

Dr. Fantus also coined the term "blood bank," in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that year that set out the hospital's methodology in clear, understandable terms.

Other institutions swiftly developed their own blood-storage facilities, and helped themselves to Fantus's catchy term as well.

Cook County's blood-storage innovation came at a critical time, just a few years before the start of World War II, when blood donated by people thousands of miles from the battlefronts would make the difference between life and death for a great many injured Allied soldiers.

Blood's ability to stop flowing — to clot — is a wondrous property that keeps us from bleeding to death after minor injuries. However, that trait was a major stumbling block to perfecting blood transfusions.

Even early in the 20th century, a few minutes into any transfusion, blood would begin to clump together in the tube that was carrying it from donor to recipient, and the technician would have to start over. Letting blood sit in a container for any length of time was out of the question.

Richard Lewisohn

A number of researchers were working on the problem. The Belgian physician Albert Hustin, and the Argentinian doctor Luis Agote, both hit on the anticoagulant properties of sodium citrate in 1914, but the bad news was that the common compound was toxic in blood.

Dr. Richard Lewisohn of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital solved that problem with exhaustive experiments.  The German-born Lewisohn, who had trained at the excellent University of Freiburg, discovered the concentration at which sodium citrate could keep blood liquid without poisoning the transfusion recipient.

At first, it looked as if sodium citrate had a worrisome set of side effects, but Lewisohn proved that those were caused by infectious agents in poorly cleaned equipment. In the end, he showed that a diluted sodium citrate concentrate in blood, deployed with meticuously maintained needles and tubes, worked just about perfectly. In fact, it is still used.

Once the medical profession accepted Lewisohn's elegant solution to the clotting conundrum — and that took years — blood transfusions were transformed from a traumatic undertaking to the routine procedure they are today.

In 1916, just in time for World War I, researchers determined that sodium citrate allowed blood to be stored outside the body for up to two weeks.

In 1894, Marie Francois Sadi Carnot, the president of France, was stabbed by a would-be assassin in Lyons. By today's standards, the wound was not severe; however, the knife severed the portal vein in his abdomen. Carnot bled to death because up to that point, no one had figured out how to repair blood vessels.

One man undertook to change that, Alexis Carrel, a student in Lyons who was appalled by Carnot's death, in his hometown, while a number of physicians stood by and watched.

But consider the problem — repairing a tiny, elastic, living tube, part of a network of tubes of different sizes and functions, so that it would retain its ability to channel many gallons of blood every day, birth to death, without a hitch.

The story is that Carrel — Dr. Carrel by 1900 — studied with Marie-Anne Leroudier, one of the most proficient needlewomen in Lyons (her work was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893), learning to make minute, uniform stitches. He developed a triangular system that allowed him to rapidly close up a vein or artery end-to-end without having the stitches adhere to the opposite wall, ushering in the birth of vascular surgery.

Carrel came to the University of Chicago in 1904, where his prodigious 21 months' work as an assistant to G. N. Stewart at the Hull Laboratory laid the groundwork for transplantation surgery. That work was the basis for Carrel's becoming the first scientist working in the United States to win the Nobel Prize for medicine, in 1912. Carrel soon moved on to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York.

(Carrel's collaborator at the U. of C., Charles Claude Guthrie, was miffed that he was not included in the Nobel Prize. Guthrie possibly lost points with the Nobel committee for his subsequent experiments in St. Louis with head transplants.)

Carrel was a complicated man, compassion and curiosity mixed up with arrogance and resentment. He was a eugenicist — that is, he subscribed to the false science of "perfecting" the human race by eliminating traits judged to be inferior — and he was also an enthusiastic believer in the miracle cures at the shrine at Lourdes. At the time of his death in 1944, in Paris, he was working on a project for the collaborationist Vichy government.

In 1900, the Austrian chemist, botanist and medical researcher Karl Landsteiner realized that not all human blood is alike, that some people's blood contains substances that are toxic to other people's blood.

That began to solve the mystery of why some people who received blood transfusions were fine, while others became ill and often died.

Landsteiner subsequently discovered three of the four genetically determined blood groups or types, O, A and B. A couple of years later, Alfred von Decastello and Adriano Sturli, Landsteiner's colleagues in Vienna, identified a fourth blood group, AB. While about 30 blood types have been discovered, the original four essentially cover everyone.

In 1910, at the Heidelberg Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Germany, Ludwig Hirszfeld and Emil von Dungern demonstrated that blood type is an inherited trait.

In the speech he made when he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his work, Landsteiner described the mystery blood presented, and how he and his fellow researchers unraveled its secrets.

In 1922, Landsteiner moved to the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in New York, where he discovered an extremely powerful blood antigen he called "the Rh factor."

Today, hospital personnel make sure they know a mother's blood type in case she needs a transfusion. She will also be tested for her Rh factor because it can pose a danger to her baby's well being.

In the early 17th century, before the scientific method began its ascendancy in the Western world, the Englishman William Harvey described how the blood circulates through the human body, solving a mystery that had stumped scientists for centuries.

Some other scientists — Galen, the ancient Greek; Ibn al-Nafis, who worked in Egypt in the 13th century; and Michael Servetus, a 16th-century Spaniard — had got a chunk of the story right.

William Harvey

Only Harvey, who assiduously tested his theories on living animals, figured out that blood circulates throughout the entire body.

He published his thesis in 1628, as On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. His discovery is considered one of the most important achievements in medical history.

Harvey introduced the "experimental and observational approach" to scientific inquiry, the British medical historian P.M. Dunn writes in an article for the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

In addition to his revolutionary work on blood, Harvey also advanced our understanding of human reproduction. His practice extended to obstetrics, and he was interested in and knowledgeable about birth.

Harvey's 1651 book On the Generation of Animals, published with the stunning essay "On Parturition," debunked the idea that embryos were fully formed at conception, and advanced the theory of epigenesis, which held correctly that a chick, for example, grew all its various parts from a single cell.

Harvey also addressed labor, advising birth attendants to let nature take its course rather than to intervene unnecessarily. Harvey's tract was the first original work on obstetrics written by an Englishman. Aside from these famous works, the rest of his prodigious writing has been lost.

What remains is "truly remarkable when judged against the ignorance of the times and the prevalent reliance on ancient authority," Dunn writes of Harvey.

Abraham Flexner, the author of a report that re-structured American medical education, and his brother Simon, who headed up the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, were two of the most influential men of their day. But they owed their success to some degree to their older brother Jacob.

Jacob Flexner

Their father, Morris, lost his haberdashery business in Louisville, Ky., in the Panic of 1873. Jacob, an intelligent young man who hoped to be a doctor, was forced to go to work immediately to help support the family. He became a pharmacist, as close as he could get to his dream, and eventually owned his own store, according to an account by Ward O. Griffen MD in The Annals of Surgery.

“Upon that choice my whole subsequent career and those of others of our family have depended," Abraham Flexner wrote years later in his autobiography.

Jacob "was throughout his life a person of quick and remarkable intelligence, and he must have realized that we were all destined to humble careers unless at the first opportunity a break was made," Abraham Flexner wrote.

Jacob Flexner was a Louisville pharmacist, but he too played a role in the birth story.

After Simon Flexner dropped out of the sixth grade in Louisville, Ky., in the 1870s, his father, Morris, arranged a tour for him of the town jail, warning that if he didn't straighten out, that was where he would wind up.

But after Simon, the fourth of nine children, nearly died of typhoid fever at the age of 16, he found his passion — infectious diseases.

Simon Flexner

Flexner went to work as an apprentice in his brother Jacob's pharmacy, where he learned to use a microscope. Doctors he knew from the store gave him tissue samples for his self-directed studies in histology, the study of microscopic structures in tissues, and pathology.

At 26, he earned his medical degree from the two-year program at the University of Louisville. His younger brother Abraham, a recent graduate of  Johns Hopkins University, arranged for Simon to study pathology there under William Henry Welch, who was helping to bring the scientific method to American medicine.

Flexner became a microbe hunter extraordinaire, helping to suss out the causes of meningitis among Maryland coal miners, bubonic plague in San Francisco's Chinatown, and a common dysentery that is now known as Flexner's bacillus. He also played a critical role in the conquest of polio.

In 1902, Flexner became the head of the new Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and this is where the birth story intersects his own. Flexner assembled an amazing team of scientists that included Alexis Carrel, Peyton Rous and Karl Langsteiner who, among other achievements, brought blood transfusion to reality.

In 1899, John Whitridge Williams, whose name lives on in the definitive textbook on pregnancy and childbirth, succeeded Howard Kelly as the head of obstetrics at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Kelly had split off baby-catching from the more interesting (to him) department of gynecology, which he continued to head up.

Williams, a Baltimore native, came from a medical family -- his mother's forebears had been doctors for 160 years. He trained at the University of Maryland, and then in Vienna, Berlin, and other European cities, which exposed him to a different way of looking at medicine.

Williams' Obstetrics, first published in 1903, and still in print today, came out of Williams' desire to render everything about pregnancy and birth in scientific terms. The first edition contained more than 1,000 references to other medical publications.

Williams wrote five additional editions of the book before he died in 1931, of complications from abdominal surgery.

The departments of obstetrics and gynecology were finally reunited at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1960.

The 23rd edition of Williams' Obstetrics was published in 2009.