The Men in Her Life

"It was like this," said the obstetrician to colleagues in the staff lounge: "A Rubin test had shown the Fallopian tubes to be patent, and a Huehner test showed normal sperm survival at two hours. The patient said her last period began June 8, so by Naegele's rule, the confinement was due about March 15. But her history was bad --a Latzko Caesarean section for Bandl's ring and toxemia--and we found a hydatid of Morgagni then. On pelvic examination, Skene's ducts were normal, but the left Bartholin gland was slightly enlarged. Chadwick's sign was positive. A Papanicolaou smear was negative. Her Aschheim-Zondek was positive."

If his audience had held still, the name-dropping doctor could have continued in this style for half an hour. For the anatomy and pathology of the female reproductive system are bound up with the names of pioneers who explored their mysteries. Virtually all these pioneers were males, so in any technical account of a woman's intimate life there are many more men than she suspects. The most notable, numbering 101, are the heroes of Obstetric and Gynecologic Milestones (Macmillan; $15), by Obstetrician-Gynecologist Harold Speert of Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

Like Magellan. Dr. Speert, 43, subtitles his book Essays in Eponymy, and stoutly defends the oft-criticized practice of naming matters medical for their discoverers. These men are as much entitled to be so commemorated, he suggests, as pioneers in other spheres whose eponyms are undisputed--the Strait of Magellan, Mount Everest, Halley's comet. But his book is for fellow specialists, and he does not advocate that laymen learn the jargon of the clinical conference.

Oddly, the two most familiar of Dr. Speert's great names are among the earliest and latest: Gabriele Falloppio (circa 1523-62), who vividly described the oviduct as uteri tuba, or trumpet of the uterus, and George Nicholas Papanicolaou, 75, whose technique for detecting early cancer by smearing vaginal secretions on glass slides for microscopic study of cells has become, since 1943, standard procedure in thousands of doctors' offices.

Three Slaves. In between are such notables as Caspar Bartholin (1655-1738), who identified the vulvovaginal lubricating glands; Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682-1771), a versatile anatomist; Friedrich Trendelenburg (1844-1924), who perfected the head-down, hips-up position for surgery on the pelvis; Isidor Clinton Rubin (1883-1958), who devised a way of blowing C02 through the Fallopian tubes as a fertility test; and the team of Selmar Aschheim, 80, and Bernhard Zondek, 67, whose mouse test has answered--millions of times, quickly and accurately--the question: "Am I pregnant?"

Rarely are the female subjects of gynecology's heroes honored. Three who suffered, willy-nilly, in the cause of surgical progress were the slaves Anarcha. Betsy and Lucy, on whom the flamboyant South Carolinian James Marion Sims (1813-83) operated repeatedly to perfect a method of closing openings (the result of childbirth injury) between the bladder and vagina--then one of the most distressing complaints that woman was heir to. Dr. Sims is honored with a statue in Manhattan's Central Park, but the slaves are not even named in Dr. Speert's index.

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