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Record W1997440900 · doi:10.1353/vcr.2009.0016

Baby Incubators and the Prosthetic Womb

2009· article· en· W1997440900 on OpenAlex
Nadja Durbach

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueVictorian review · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedical History and Innovations
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEnthusiasmSyndicateEntertainmentPopularityHistoryAdvertisingBusinessLawPolitical sciencePsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Baby Incubators and the Prosthetic Womb Nadja Durbach (bio) In the final years of Victoria's reign, the incubator-baby show was all the rage. Making their British debut at the Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl's Court in the summer of 1897, baby incubators quickly became a craze, appearing at a variety of popular entertainment venues (Silverman 129-31; Baker 86-106; Barr). According to the Era, they were visited by many members of the royal family as well as by "thousands of interested spectators" ("As the [End Page 23] season advances..." 19). Their popularity prompted the formation of at least two joint stock companies for the purpose of exhibiting the genuine article and encouraged many "unscrupulous imitators" to tour their fake contraptions around fairs and resorts (Schenkein and Coney; "Wanted to Purchase" 27; Board of Trade). But in the United Kingdom at least, this popular interest in baby incubators did not last long. By the first years of the new century, the novelty had worn off, the Baby Incubators Syndicate and the Eureka Incubators Syndicate had both dissolved, and showmen were desperately trying to rid themselves of these cumbersome prosthetic wombs. Enthusiasm for displays of baby incubators came in part from anxieties around the declining birth rate. The baby incubator had been devised in France in the 1870s, a period that witnessed rapid depopulation (Silverman 127-8; Baker 45). By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was experiencing a similar problem: in 1871 there had been 34.7 births per thousand; by 1901 this figure had fallen to 28.5. This was partly due to an escalation in premature births, which rose forty per cent between 1886 and 1896 (Ballantyne 1200; "Use of Incubators" 1491). "It may not be possible exactly to define their value to the State and community," argued the British obstetrician J.W. Ballantyne, but there existed a "pressing need to conserve the lives of [premature] infants," for "economic as well as sentimental" reasons (1200). The incubator was extolled as key to this process, for within their "glass cases," "immature specimens" of human life could now be reared to maturity ("Immature Infants"). An article in a popular periodical explicitly described the baby incubator as a "hot-house," suggesting that infants could be cultivated like orchids (Smith 772). Another, noting that these devices derived from poultry incubators, facetiously queried, "Do they hatch children, nowadays, like eggs?" ("Incubators for Infants"). An 1898 comic song played on these nationalistic fears of depopulation with its lyric "I hope to breed a nation by the means of incubation" ("The Infant Incubator"). Although the sinister nature of breeding or hatching children seems to have fallen on deaf ears, these artificial wombs were not entirely without controversy. Their public display generated a variety of concerns, some explicitly about substitution. Ballantyne described the arrival of the infant prematurely "expelled from the uterus" as both a shock to its bodily systems and a form of culture shock: "He is like some dweller in the hot plains of India who has been transported in a moment of time on some 'magic carpet of Tangu' to the chill summits of the 'frosty Caucasus'" (1196). While it was impractical to keep what an article in the Lancet similarly termed these "unwelcome little strangers" in an artificial version of amniotic fluid for fear of aspiration, incubators were kept moist and warm and as aseptic as possible in an attempt to reproduce the comfort and safety of the uterine environment ("Immature Infants"). They were ventilated by holes, which one reporter described as "orifices," thus furthering the suggestion that the incubator was in fact a stand-in for the maternal body that had ceased to perform its reproductive duties ("Incubators for Infants"). [End Page 24] Press coverage of these artificial wombs championed their accomplishments and in the process downplayed the importance of the female body to fetal development. By the 1890s, there was a wide variety of models available, many of which were celebrated for their portability, accuracy, and simplicity. The baby incubator, asserted the British Medical Journal, could now "be used without any special skilled knowledge" ("Reports and Analyses and Descriptions" 348; Baker 66-85). Similarly, the Lancet...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.958
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.223
Teacher spread0.208 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it