Done at Last!

I finally got around to completing a task that had been on my To Do list for literally years last night — digitizing and uploading a PDF copy of Decompression Babies (PDF, 4.73 MB) to the site!

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This is the book by David M. Rorvik and O. S. Heyns that attempted to promote the benefits of prenatal abdominal decompression to the World beyond the medical community back in 1973.

It’s a fairly short and easy read, heavy on anecdotal arguments and somewhat light on hard science, but it provides a fascinating insight into the future of childbirth as seen from the past!

O.S. Heyns was the South African Obstetrician who discovered the benefits of prenatal abdominal decompression back in the 1950’s, and subsequently spent more than a decade practicing and promoting the technique.

David M. Rorvik is an American and former reporter for Time magazine, who went on to write a number of often-controversial books about the future of human reproduction.

2 thoughts on “Done at Last!

  1. While I have the hard copy – a few – glad to see it in this form. 50 years have
    gone by. Tragic it did not catch on and not apparently much researched for its
    potential benefits beyond what Rorvik wrote about. Spoke to the wife of the
    Houston Doc who used on some 1000 patients many years ago and long after
    he died. He wrote the intro. Died at a young age.

    • Thanks David — I agree that prenatal abdominal decompression appears to have been dismissed by the medical establishment prematurely, at least in the West (although it’s apparently available in Slovenia and Russia, according to other folks that have commented on this site at least!).

      I think part of the reason is that O. S. Heyns scientific methodology was not seen as sufficiently robust, and alternative approaches were found for the treatment of pre-eclampsia — neither of which really explain why research in prenatal abdominal decompression appears to have ended in the 1970’s.

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