Jorge Odon: The car mechanic who uncorked a childbirth revolution
A "potentially revolutionary" device
to help women during difficult births has come from an unlikely source - a car
mechanic from Argentina, who based the idea on a party trick.
Apart from having five children of his own, Jorge Odon had no connection with the world of obstetrics. He did however have a talent for invention.
"It comes naturally - for instance if I have a problem in my workplace I will go to bed and my head will think it through and I will wake up in the middle of the night with a solution," he says.
He has eight patents to his name. But until 2005, all his inventions were in the field of mechanics - stabilisation bars, car suspensions, and the like.
All this changed after Odon's staff at the garage showed him a YouTube video revealing how to extract a loose cork from inside an empty bottle. It's remarkably simple. You tilt the bottle, stuff a plastic bag down the neck and blow into the opening. The bag balloons inside the bottle, wrapping itself tightly around the cork. Then you just pull it out.
Odon immediately challenged a friend, Carlos Modena, to
a bet over dinner. He placed a bottle containing a cork on the dinner table, and
laid out several objects, including a bread bag. Thoroughly puzzled, Modena
insisted the only way of getting the cork out would be to smash the bottle. So
Odon showed him his trick, and won the bet.
But that night, as he slept next to his wife, Odon had a lightbulb moment - what if he used the same principle to help women give birth? At 04:00 he tried to wake her up. "Marcela, this cork trick could make labour easier!" he said. His wife mumbled, "That's nice," turned over and went back to sleep.
In the days that followed, Odon kept mulling it over, but found it difficult to get people to listen to him. Most thought the idea was crazy. Eventually he persuaded Modena to introduce him to his family's obstetrician.
Jorge Odon demonstrates the device on a dummy at Des
Moines University "We went to a hospital and sat - in our suits - in a room full of expectant mothers," Odon says. "My friend was still sceptical, so when we went to see the doctor, at first he sat quite far away from me. But once he saw that the doctor was interested in this idea and quite impressed, he moved his chair closer and started saying 'we' have invented this!"
Encouraged, Odon registered a patent and set about
building a prototype. He and Modena took his daughter's dolls and some jam jars,
and began experimenting in his workshop. "Two men in the toilet, with my
daughters' toys, taking them out of a jar, with Vaseline. Our colleagues could
see us and obviously they thought we were a little bit mad," he says.
Once he had a working model, Odon approached Dr Javier Schvartzman at the Centre for Medical Education and Clinical Research in Buenos Aires. When Odon got out his bottle and cork, Schvartzman wondered if he was being secretly filmed for a hidden-camera show.
"When he showed me the trick I thought it was crazy - crazy but interesting," he says. But he agreed to work with Odon to develop the device.
The first prototype was a glass uterus, into which two large bags were introduced. When Schvartzman explained that thrusting a bag all the way into the uterus might perforate its lining, Odon adapted the model so that the bag was only applied over the head.
By 2008, the project had come to the attention of the World Health Organization. On a visit to Buenos Aires, its chief co-ordinator for improving maternal and perinatal health, Dr Mario Merialdi, asked for a demonstration. The meeting, planned to last 10 minutes, stretched to two hours.
"I was intrigued, but also sceptical because for many years, almost centuries, there has been no innovation in this area of work," Merialdi says.
Birthing instruments are used in about one in 10 births, usually forceps, or the ventouse - where a suction cap attached to the head helps to pull the baby out. Both have downsides. Forceps may damage vaginal tissues and can fracture the baby's skull, as there is no limit to how much force you can apply. A ventouse delivery is less traumatic for the mother, but may still damage the baby's scalp.
Bruising from forceps and scabs from ventouse
Forceps were first developed in the 16th Century by the Chamberlen family, Huguenot surgeons who fled to London from France, and kept their invention under wraps. Once their secret got out, other surgeons copied them. "The Victorian era saw some monstrous modifications such as attaching the handles of the forceps to a winch, while the mother was tied down, in order to improve the traction," says Damian Eustace from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. However, the forceps in use today haven't changed much since the late 1800s - the more complicated they become, the harder they are to use and the more expensive to sterilise.
The earliest known vacuum extractor - the Air Tractor - was produced in 1838 by James Young Simpson in Edinburgh. But it only really became a practical alternative to the forceps in the 1950s with the development of the Malmstrom extractor, named after Swedish professor Tage Malmstrom. "Modifications of his original design are still in use on labour wards today," Eustace says, but new materials (plastics and siliconised rubber) have radically improved the apparatus and, at least in the UK, it is now used more commonly than forceps.
