Word: abdomen
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...1950s by Professor Ockert S. Heyns (pronounced Haynes), 61, of the Uni versity of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Heyns, seeking means of relaxing and stretching abdominal muscles during labor to reduce the pain of childbirth, hit upon the notion that a reduction of atmospheric pressure outside the abdomen might help. According to him, a woman's uterus pushes forward and changes shape from oval to nearly spherical during labor contractions. But often, he explains, the muscles of the abdominal wall interfere with this transformation, causing pain and prolonging birth...
...tent or bag of plastic supported by a barrel-shaped glass-fiber frame. The zippered bag encases the woman from the armpits down. As the pregnant mother relaxes in a chair, a hose attached to the frame draws air out of the enclosure, reducing air pressure on the abdomen by as much as 3 Ibs. per square inch. Normal pressure within the abdomen remains constant, pushing out the abdominal muscle as decompression outside increases...
...punches Lester aims at his broad target, only a few can land with appreciable force. The rest necessarily have to deflect off each other, mutually weakening themselves. When John Lennon, in his non-Beatle debut, dies, he dies in a realistic ugly field with realistic blood spewing from his abdomen. But he doesn't just die realistically. He sits there, observes the blood oozing out, looks up at the audience, and says, "I knew this would happen. You knew it would happen too, didn't you?" And the camera cuts, with him still sitting there...
...Pakistan. The inevitable Egyptian papyrus mentions it; Aristotle urged it in general terms, and so did Plato for every woman after 40; Roman husbands were entitled to order it. Anthropologist George Devereux has catalogued dozens of ancient methods-magical incantations, jumping from high places, applying hot coals to the abdomen. Hawaiian women fashioned stilettos representing Kupo, god of abortions, then thrust them into the uterus. Even now, Ceylonese girls brew an abortifacient by boiling a poisonous yam in cow urine or liquid dung, and then swallow the stuff for seven days...
Poor, scrawny, rich Twiggy. Last week it was one Professor Rupprecht Bernbeck, a Hamburg orthopedist, who viewed with alarm the 17-year-old cockney dowsing rod, opined that "practically everything is wrong with her-she has a humpback, exaggerated curvature of the spine and a hanging abdomen," all leading inevitably to "pains in the loins and the hips." Nothing would help old Twig, he added, except maybe swimming or "crawling around on all fours for ten minutes each morning and evening." Whereupon Mrs. Nell Hornby, Twiggy's mother, spoke up: "What a load of rubbish...