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In his time Dr. DeLee has taught obstetrics to more than 3,500 nurses, 7,000 medical students. 540 postgraduate doctors. In Lying-in-Hospital, where babies are kept in glass cubicles to protect them from infection, 2,881 babies were born last year. Of them only 62 babies died. Death came to only 15 mothers at Lying-in. No other busy maternity hospital on earth can meet that record for low mortality. Dr. DeLee holds his death rate down by compelling pregnant women who have any infection to have their babies in a building widely separated from his regular maternity rooms. He also avoids maternal deaths by forbidding "meddlesome midwifery." He always waits for the baby to be born through the mother's own efforts unless some accident of parturition or pelvic malformation compels him to use drugs or forceps.
His use of forceps was his chief reason for attending the convention of the American Medical Association in Kansas City last week. One of the twelve speakers at the general scientific meetings, he was asked to present his mile-long talking cinema called The Forceps Operation. One of 16 films in which Dr. DeLee shows the various ways in which a baby may be born, The Forceps Operation was the most popular event at the A. M. A. convention. Some 5,000 physicians attended the screening, heard Dr. DeLee clear his throat, saw Dr. DeLee, who once wanted to be an actor, perform with no camera shyness.
The action begins in Dr. DeLee's lecture room. A nurse enters, asks, "Are you ready, doctor? Dr. [Morris Edward] Davis thinks there may be a forceps case in the birth room." Dr. DeLee reads the mother's hospital chart, looks up, announces, "Forceps may really be needed. . . . Gentlemen, this is a forceps case. Let us proceed to the amphitheatre." There a woman, asleep under ether, is ready for delivery. Dr. DeLee surveys her, murmurs, "Hm! Looks like a nine-pounder." Swiftly he nicks the woman's vulva so that it will spread and prevent the birth from tearing the perineum. Deftly he inserts the forceps, engages the baby's head, pulls with all his cleverness. The baby is born, apparently little disturbed by the greatest strain it ever will undergo the rest of its life.
Back in Chicago last week Dr. DeLee looked about for material for a new cinema to be called Local Anesthesia in Obstetrics. He performs Caesarean sections under local anesthesia but thinks that "the increasing tendency to perform Caesarean section is to be condemned. There are too many of these operations being done by those who do not know how to do them or to discover reasons for their necessity."
Other DeLee obstetrical aphorisms: "The lack of prenatal care is responsible for many deaths, despite some improvement. It is safe to say that not 25% of American women get proper prenatal care.
"Puerperal infection still causes about 4,000 deaths a year in the U. S. The frequency of operations which are followed by infection is a contributing cause. Many women get infections in hospitals when they are not properly isolated-they may be mixed with pneumonia or erysipelas. A small proportion of cases of puerperal infection is of course, unpreventable-women who catch colds or other infectious diseases.