Word: uterus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...search for data is being steadily pushed back from childhood to earliest infancy and even before birth. One French obstetrician, for example, inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a woman about to give birth and tape-recorded what the fetus could hear: the mother's loudly thumping heartbeat, a variety of whooshing sounds, the muffled but distinguishable voices of the mother and her male doctor, and, from a distance, the clearly identifiable strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...
...often moves in rhythm with its mother's voice. At the most complex levels, surgeons at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago can diagnose prenatal hydrocephalus (a brain-damaging excess of cerebrospinal fluid) in a fetus, then introduce a plastic tube into the mother's uterus and into the fetus' head to drain off the surplus fluid inside its brain. Guiding many of these technological innovations is the ubiquitous computer, which can synthesize a mother's voice as easily as it can measure eye movements or count the times that young Gery sucks...
...babies do any of the things they do is a matter of considerable complexity. Some theorists, like Thomas Verny, a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, believe the infant begins learning behavior patterns while it is still in the uterus. Most experts, however, assume that the genes still carry messages that primitive humans once needed for survival. The so-called Moro reflex,* for example, which makes a newborn infant reach out its arms in a desperate grasping motion whenever it feels itself falling, implies some monkey-like existence at the dawn of time. Says Lewis...
Brazelton is in the midst of a project of "intervention research" that involves studying 100 undersized babies and trying to see which of them will need special assistance. Babies that have been undernourished in the uterus are "very scrawny, very hypersensitive to any kind of stimulation, and they become very fussy and difficult for the parents," says Brazelton. "They need help to see their baby as a person. You have to help parents see that you're seeing the same baby they are. And that the baby doesn't need to be like them. And they...
...decade Kleist had proposed suicide pacts to friends. Finally, at 34, he found a woman who said yes. Henriette Vogel had a long, pointed nose, pockmarked cheeks, insolent eyes and cancer of the uterus. Kleist, who probably died a virgin, loved her as his angel of death...