“A familiar, not fearful place”: sensory histories of hospital birth in twentieth-century North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper unpacks sensory histories of childbirth in the North American obstetric ward, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1970. Focusing on the intertwining of spaces, bodies, and behaviors, this paper argues that control and mastery of the childbirth experience – including control of pain, key to the “achievement” of a successful natural birth – was seen to be inextricably rooted in familiarity with the hospital environment, the maternity ward, and delivery room. This familiarity, carefully developed during antenatal training, was a necessary precondition for the maintenance of true relaxation throughout the birth experience, a state which demanded the continued management of a range of sensory stimuli, and the strategic use of touch, “whispered encouragements” from the father-to-be, and measured instruction from the (often male) physician to guide the expectant mother through the interpretation of her own sensory experiences and the various stages of labor and delivery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".