I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school."-from Birth Day So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly three thousand births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas. In Birth Day, Sloan draws on his personal and professional experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and culture into a fascinating-and often funny-tapestry of this fundamental human passage.Birth Day takes the reader on a remarkable journey, from the dawn of human history to the quiet efficiency of a modern operating room; from Aristotle and Julius Caesar to a trailblazing, cross-dressing British army surgeon; from a recent past filled with the horrors of childbirth gone wrong to a present day, in which every pregnancy is expected to end happily. Some of Birth Day's many topics include• The evolution of human childbirth-or, why do gorillas have it so easy?• The first five minutes of life-scuba divers, astronauts, and the amazing adaptations that transform a fetus into an air-breathing, out-in-the-world baby• Cesarean section-a look at its origins, its future, and how it came to be the most frequently performed operation in American hospitals• Pain and politics-the age-old quest for pain...