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I regret to inform you that chainsaws were originally invented for childbirth
(close your legs and prepare ye for a thread, sources here: https://bit.ly/3jMoOdl )
(close your legs and prepare ye for a thread, sources here: https://bit.ly/3jMoOdl )
When you see a chainsaw hacking down a tree, the thought probably furthest from your mind is "I bet that would work well on my junk".
Well, get ready to think that forevermore, because it turns out that chainsaws were first designed for hacking away at genitals, before being applied to oak.
Childbirth may not always be easy today, but in a time before nitrous oxide, sanitation, and our good friend copious amounts of morphine and its good friend heroin, it was significantly worse.
The first published account of an attempted C-section in the US, for instance, is genuinely horrifying. In an 1830 edition of the Western Journal of Medical and Physical Sciences, Dr John L. Richmond described the case of a difficult birth during a storm.
After many hours, with labor failing to progress, the doctor believed the woman's life to be in grave danger and “feeling a deep and solemn sense of my responsibility, with only a case of common pocket instruments, about one o'clock that night, I commenced the Caesarean Section."
Using the blade of a crooked pair of scissors - he had arrogantly said he needed no help earlier, and now this was all he had to use - he cut into the mother and attempted to remove the fetus.
However, "as it was uncommonly large, and the mother very fat, and having no assistance, I found this part of my operation more difficult than I had anticipated," he wrote.
With the mother in too much agony - being a person rather than a dress - he decided that "a childless mother was better than a motherless child" and set about saving the mother and removing the fetus.
This involved cutting up the fetus to remove it. This is all to say that complicated births before safe c-sections were entirely grim.
Far more common, from 1597 until when C-sections became safe, was a surgical procedure known as a symphysiotomy, in which the pubic symphysis – a joint made of cartilage above the vulva – is cut to widen the pelvis and make childbirth go more smoothly.
Like all surgical procedures of the time, it wasn't without risk, and speed was of the essence. The less time spent operating, the less likely the patient would go into shock or develop a deadly infection.
In the late 18th century, two Scottish doctors, John Aitken and James Jeffray, came up with a solution for getting the job done much more quickly and efficiently: an actual chainsaw for the groin.
The world's first chainsaw was a flexible saw based on a watch chain with teeth that were moved around with a hand-crank.
Now, rather than look down and see a doctor cutting away at your pelvis, you could look down and see the far more reassuring sight of a doctor furiously cranking a chainsaw like they were sharpening a pencil.
The truly horrific part of this is that things beforehand were so bad that somebody going to town on your nether regions with a fucking chainsaw was actually a vast improvement.
The device, finally produced in 1806, went on to be used for removing diseased joints and was eventually mechanized.
It wasn't until 1905 that somebody thought of this horror vagina device and decided to apply it to trees.
It wasn't until 1905 that somebody thought of this horror vagina device and decided to apply it to trees.
