ART and the Art of Medicine

On a summer night in 1978, as the hour approached midnight, Dr. Patrick Steptoe prepared himself for surgery A veteran obstetrician and gynecologist nearing retirement, Dr. Steptoe had delivered many babies by caesarean section, and he performed the surgery flawlessly At 11:47 pm, Louise Joy Brown came into the world, perfect and exquisite and vulnerable in that way only babies can be, though Louise Joy Brown was no ordinary baby [1]. To her parents, she was an unexpected and yearned-for gift after almost 10 years of trying to conceive; to Dr. Steptoe and his colleague, Robert Edwards, she was the culmination of countless years of research; and, to the world, she was a mixture of scientific triumph and medical marvel. She was the first so called "test tube baby," or, in the correct scientific parlance, the first baby born following in vitro fertilization (IVF), which entails extracting eggs from a woman using a needle, fertilizing one or more with sperm, and then inserting one or more of the embryos into her uterus with the hopes that one implants. This year, a pregnant Louise celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday, with her husband and their first child

Art · Empathy and Medical Education · Medicine