When Dr. Kuo-Chung Sun began delivering babies 45 years ago, the only way to tell whether a woman was expecting twins was to listen with a stethoscope for double heartbeats, and that wasn’t always accurate.
Sometimes the second baby would surprise doctor and mother. The father, who traditionally waited in another room during delivery, was the last to know.
“The stethoscope was the only way,” said Sun, 71, an obstetrician and gynecologist at St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin, who has served that area of the northwest suburbs for more than 25 years.
Nodding toward his young associate seated across the room, Sun added, “He says nobody uses them anymore.”
Dr. Robert Waer, 30, an obstetrician and gynecologist, joined Sun a few months ago at St. Joseph after completing his residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He is accustomed to determining whether a woman is carrying twins by ultrasound, which has a 1 percent chance of error.
Though both doctors sport impressive credentials and are experts in their fields, some of the differences in the ways they were trained reflect just how far modern obstetrics has come.
“The medical field goes so fast. It’s such a change,” said Sun, who received extensive training in Taiwan before completing his residency in Baltimore in 1948. “If you can’t keep up, you’d better quit.”
Among the most significant changes in the way women view pregnancy was the introduction of antibiotics and transfusions in delivery rooms.
Before these medical miracles arrived in the mid-1950s, pregnancy often was viewed as a life-threatening condition. It is estimated that more than 100 of every 100,000 women giving birth once died from complications, compared with about 7 per 100,000 today.
And like many doctors in practice before the ’70s, Sun remembers when it also was rare for babies born more than six weeks premature to survive.
“You just put (the baby) in a bassinet. If it made it, it made it,” Waer said. Neonatal intensive care units did not exist to help those infants whose lungs were not fully developed. These days, he said, “we get really aggressive” and can deliver babies born after just 25 weeks of fetal development weighing about a pound.
Another sweeping change is the amount of time women remain in hospitals after childbirth. Sun recalls five-day recuperation periods; Waer is accustomed to having hospitals, urged by insurance companies, send mothers and their newborns home within 24 to 36 hours.
And how far has pain relief come? The only effective option available to laboring mothers when Sun began his practice was morphine.
Since the mid-1940s, though, he has seen the rise of prepared childbirth techniques and painkillers, including drugs that sent mothers into “twilight sleep” or potent pain relievers that allow women to stay awake and alert.
In the mid-1970s, Sun was among the first obstetricians to let fathers witness the birth. Colleagues, Sun said, thought he was “nuts.” But the obstetrician believed that men should be involved in the birth experience, which also would help enhance their sensitivity to pregnant women.
For Waer, this was never an issue.
“I make them come in,” he said, and fathers can even be present during Caesarean sections. “They were there for the first part. They can be there for the last,” he said. “They don’t need to be standing in the waiting room talking on the phone or watching the football game.”
