{"product_id":"9780692220214","title":"Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth","description":"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school.\"-from Birth Day \u003cp\u003eSo began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly three thousand births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas. In Birth Day, Sloan draws on his personal and professional experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and culture into a fascinating-and often funny-tapestry of this fundamental human passage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBirth Day takes the reader on a remarkable journey, from the dawn of human history to the quiet efficiency of a modern operating room; from Aristotle and Julius Caesar to a trailblazing, cross-dressing British army surgeon; from a recent past filled with the horrors of childbirth gone wrong to a present day, in which every pregnancy is expected to end happily. Some of Birth Day's many topics include\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• The evolution of human childbirth-or, why do gorillas have it so easy?\u003cbr\u003e• The first five minutes of life-scuba divers, astronauts, and the amazing adaptations that transform a fetus into an air-breathing, out-in-the-world baby\u003cbr\u003e• Cesarean section-a look at its origins, its future, and how it came to be the most frequently performed operation in American hospitals\u003cbr\u003e• Pain and politics-the age-old quest for painless childbirth, starring Adam and Eve, Queen Victoria, a nineteenth-century medical brawl, and the rise of today's \"epidural monoculture\"\u003cbr\u003e• Daddies-raging paternal hormones, hidden anxieties, and the emotional evolution of men (including the author, his father, and grandfather) as they approach fatherhood\u003cbr\u003e• The five senses at birth-does light enter the womb? how loud is it in there? what is a newborn baby searching for with those first anxious glances?\u003cbr\u003e• A tour of the newborn body-springy skulls, hairy ears, innies and outies, the advantages (and disadvantages) of looking like your father, and why the United States is one of the world's most circumcised nations\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDelightfully instructive and entertaining, Birth Day offers a fresh, sometimes irreverent take on a universally familiar topic. Warm, reassuring, and packed with stories from the author's work and life, this unique book is one pediatrician's meditation on the hiding-in-plain-sight marvels of human birth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bodega Bay Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49795605627120,"sku":"9780692220214","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780692220214","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}