Obstetrics has always attracted a peculiar breed of people.

Faced with one of humanity’s oldest problems, they built stranger forceps, experimented on themselves, kept life-saving inventions secret for almost a century and, in one memorable case, designed a new obstetric device after watching a YouTube video about removing a cork from a wine bottle.

Perhaps no story is stranger than that of the Chamberlen family.¹

The French Huguenots fled religious persecution and settled in England during the early 17^th century, where they developed what is widely regarded as the first true obstetric forceps. Rather than publishing their invention or teaching others, they treated it as the family business. When summoned to a difficult labour they reportedly arrived carrying an ornate wooden box, insisted everybody leave the room, concealed the instrument beneath blankets and sometimes even blindfolded the labouring woman. A little while later they would emerge holding a healthy baby.²

For almost a hundred years, nobody knew how they were doing it.

Only centuries later were early Chamberlen forceps discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the family home, one of the great archaeological discoveries in medical history. Imagine inventing one of the most important advances in obstetrics and deciding not to tell anybody.

James Young Simpson was cut from different cloth.

Today he is remembered for introducing chloroform into obstetric practice, but the way he arrived there would almost certainly fail every modern ethics committee. Simpson and his friends gathered around the dining room table inhaling different chemicals to see what happened. One evening they all inhaled chloroform, laughed, became progressively incoherent and eventually collapsed unconscious across the furniture. When they awoke, Simpson realised they might just have changed medicine forever.

Then there was Christian Kielland.

Few instruments inspire stronger opinions than Kielland’s forceps. Introduced by the meticulous Norwegian obstetrician in 1915, their sliding lock and minimal pelvic curve transformed rotational deliveries.³ More than a century later, merely mentioning Kielland’s in a labour ward is enough to provoke equal measures of admiration, nostalgia, and mild anxiety. Every obstetrician seems to have a Kielland story, and most have a strong opinion about whether they should still be used.

The Neville-Barnes forceps hide a different curiosity.

Despite what many assume, Neville-Barnes was not one man. Robert Barnes designed the original forceps, while William Neville later developed the ingenious axis-traction handle that made them even better. Rather than replacing Barnes’ invention, Neville improved it, and their names became permanently linked. It is a lovely reminder that progress in medicine is often collaborative rather than competitive.

Forceps, however, tell only half the story. The 20^th century saw the rise of vacuum extraction, particularly through the work of the Swedish obstetrician Tage Malmström. His original stainless steel ventouse cup was wonderfully effective, if not especially forgiving. Over the decades came softer cups, disposable systems, and portable devices like the Kiwi, each generation attempting to achieve the same goal with a little more finesse than the last.⁴

Then, in 2008, along came Jorge Odón. Odón was not an obstetrician. He was an Argentinian car mechanic.⁵ One day he watched a YouTube video demonstrating how to remove a cork that had accidentally fallen into a wine bottle. The solution involved slipping a plastic bag past the cork, inflating it, and gently pulling both bag and cork back through the neck of the bottle.

Odón thought, “I wonder whether that could deliver a baby.”

His idea evolved into the OdonAssist, attracting worldwide interest, support from the World Health Organization, and funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.⁶ Although it has not become part of routine obstetric practice, it remains one of my favourite stories in medical innovation. Sometimes a fresh perspective arrives not from a university professor but from somebody who fixes cars for a living.

Of course, not every obstetric instrument deserves nostalgic affection.

Visit a medical museum and you’ll eventually encounter cephalotribes, embryotomy scissors, and hooks that belong to a very different era of childbirth. They are confronting reminders of a time before antibiotics, blood transfusion, safe anaesthesia, and reliable caesarean birth. They are not there to celebrate. They are there to remind us how extraordinarily fortunate we are to practise modern obstetrics.

Perhaps that is why old forceps evoke such affection among obstetricians. We are looking at centuries of ingenuity, curiosity, and relentless optimism. Every curve, hinge, and handle represents somebody who believed childbirth could be made a little safer than it had been for the generation before.

And if history teaches us anything, somewhere in the world today another curious soul is probably looking at an instrument tray, convinced they can make it just a little bit better… and more importantly, name it after themselves!