by Maggie Downs posted in Life

Okay, mamas. Grab your marshmallows and gather ?round. This is going to be one heck of a horror story, courtesy of this post I just read at Blumhouse.com.
Imagine going into labor in the late 1700s, and there?s a complication with the birth. Your doctor approaches the table. In his hands, he holds a small saw and a knife. These will be used to perform a slow, agonizing procedure called symphysiotomy, in which bone and cartilage are chiseled off your pelvis for the purpose of widening the birth canal.
One more thing: Some anesthetics have been invented (yay!), but most doctors don?t employ the use of them yet. (Boo.)
So where were we" Oh, yeah. A doctor is wielding a knife at your pelvis, chipping away at your bone, leaving a horrific mess in the wake of his tiny saw. The good news is that sometime around 1780, a couple of Scottish doctors decided to make things slightly more bearable for child-bearing patients. The bad news" They did this by inventing the chainsaw.
(Turns out that was great news for the chainsaw industry, though.)

The chainsaw these guys invented was a hand-crank device -- something like a mash-up of a kitchen knife, a pencil sharpener, and a bike chain with fine, serrated teeth -- that made slicing through bone as easy as putting a hot knife through butter. Well, maybe not that easy. But easier than a tiny chisel.
This device, called an osteotome, was also utilized for dental surgeries, dissections, removing di...