Podcast appearances and mentions of Jacqueline H Wolf

By 2009, one in three births in America was by cesarean section. But the dramatic jump in numbers wasn’t necessarily due to miracles of modern medicine. Jacqueline H. Wolf, professor of the history of medicine at Ohio University, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the history of cesarean birth and the impacts it has on women’s lives and the public health system as a whole. Her book is “Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequences.”

Medical historian Jacqueline H. Wolf, a professor at Ohio University, has just authored a new book tracing the history of the use of Cesarean Section baby deliveries in the United States noting a definite upward trend in the 21st Century. The book, “Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequence,” explores the history of the C-Section from the 19th century until today. Wolf tells Spectrum podcast that Cesarean births rose in the United States by 455 percent from 4.5 percent to 25 percent for the period between 1965 and 1987. The growth has continued and now the rate for the procedure is one-third of all American births – one of every three. This is twice what is recommended by the World Health Organization. Although sometimes a C-Section is necessary for the welfare of the baby or the mother, too often it is used as a matter of convenience, according to Wolf. She details many of the risks associated with Cesarean deliveries compared to vaginal births and according to many, they are over-used. The book has received impressive reviews. Recently Slate.com called the book “Absorbing,” “Plainly excellent,” and said “Its vividness is unrivaled.” Jennifer Grayson, author of “Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy” said: “With meticulous research and sweeping insight, Jacqueline Wolf unfolds the unfathomable: how, over the course of a mere century, human beings normalized surgery as the means of bringing babies into the world. ‘Cesarean Section’ is an urgent wake-up call.” This is Wolf’s third book. She already has written “Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries” and “Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in American.” This book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

In 19th-century America, cesarean section was a treacherous, last-ditch surgery that nearly always resulted in death of the infant and, half the time, the mother. Fast forward to today, where 1 in 3 American babies is delivered via surgical birth. But even until the 1960s, cesarean section was virtually unknown to the American public, says my guest today, historian Jacqueline H. Wolf, the author of the riveting new book Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology and Consequence. The book, which will be published this May by Johns Hopkins University Press, was funded by a three-year-grant from the National Institutes of Health. In it, Professor Wolf unfolds an astounding story: How, over the span of a mere century (and most rapidly, a few decades), industrialized America normalized surgery as the means of bringing babies into the world.Some of you may recognize Jackie Wolf’s name from my book Unlatched (where she transported us to the death-by-artificial-infant-feeding epidemic of Industrial Age America). As a professor of the History of Medicine in the Department of Social Medicine at Ohio University, she is one of the foremost authorities on the history of breastfeeding and birth practices in the United States, having authored two prior books and numerous articles on the subjects in venues such as the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Social History, and The Milbank Quarterly. I was captivated by my conversations with Jackie back then, and I hope you’ll be as captivated as I was by this one, here: From the story of the first cesarean in recorded American history, the myth of Julius Caesar and the racially charged past of early cesareans; to the rise of birth as a pathological process, Jackie Kennedy's role in all this, reclaiming birth in the 21st century (including how to avoid your own C-section) and more, you won’t want to miss this episode!