<Begin Segment 34>

DG: She was asking you about some of your memories, and earlier was referring back to when saw your first birth in camp.

RI: Uh-huh. Well, that was, my first birth in camp was, yes, before I started.

DG: So did you have similar kind of feelings?

RI: Experiences?

DG: Right.

RI: Oh, no. After, after I got really exposed to frequent births it was not scary or anything like that, no. It was just the first impression wasn't so good, but I think it quickly, that impression quickly got dispersed. [Laughs]

AI: Well, maybe for people who don't know how childbirth was handled in those days, could you describe what a typical childbirth experience would be in a hospital? What would usually happen when the woman came in?

RI: Oh, well, it has changed quite a bit. In those days I think it was okay to have anesthesia. So almost everybody went through anesthesia and there wasn't that much talk about "natural childbirth." Natural childbirth might have been carried out on the outside where there could have been teams of doctors who went out in the neighborhood and like midwives conducted home deliveries. I think that was still going on. But our teaching was mostly women in labor under anesthesia and had their babies and they had episiotomy which was a cut down the, the exit, the baby's head exit, and that was probably the accepted way. Whereas now, natural childbirth is much more common and I don't know about episiotomies.

DG: What kind of anesthesia?

RI: Um... must've been general anesthesia, like inhalation kind of anesthesia. I don't think -- we didn't have epidural or spinal kind of anesthesia.

DG: And that was a time when, a girl who was twenty-five was considered somewhat old?

RI: Well, of course from the standpoint now --

DG: To be having their first...

RI: It's hard to figure that twenty-five is old. I don't think so. Of course, we didn't have women who were as old as they are now, having babies. So, probably, up to thirty. After thirty maybe they were considered elderly primipara. "Elderly" being after thirty and "primipara" would be the first babies.

DG: Yeah, we, we were, in my training we called twenty-five "grand primip."

RI: [Laughs] "Grand?" Oh. Well, I think that maybe I'm thinking more about after I was in practice. I think thirty seemed like it was about the age when we started to consider that oh, they're getting a little old to have their first baby. You know, the second, third or fourth is okay, but... so, when I had my children I was in my thirties, so I'd consider myself elderly primip, thirty-two I was, but anyway.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.