Rebecca L. Jackson

Activity: Hosting a visitor types › Hosting an academic visitor

Description

Rebecca L. Jackson is a philosopher and historian of measurement in science and medicine, focusing on clinical measuring practices and methodology. She is currently a Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities hosted by the Department of Philosophy at Durham University and the Measurement Lab within the Institute for Medical Humanities and Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities (Durham, UK).

Rebecca met members of the School to discuss philosophy and practice of measurement in different areas of our School's research. She also gave a talk titled "The Cervimeter, Centimeters, and the Friedman Curve: A Historical Case of Imprecision Medicine".

Abstract:
In 1954, a young medical resident created a new dimension for measuring labour: change in dilatation rate over time, which he saw as allowing the woman’s own body to participate in the definition of what it meant for labour to be “arrested.” Yet, in constructing a “normal” standard curve of dilatation-over-time for guiding labour decisions, and constructing a “cervimeter” to be the (so-called) objective instrument for evidencing the shape of this curve, he unintentionally enabled a new dimension of labor to emerge: centimeters of dilation, today read as the state of labor progress. This talk explains how Emanuel Friedman’s cervimeter was key to evidencing his claims about the “sigmoidal” shape of the dilatation curve, originally intended to test research claims about caudal anesthesia. I explain how the cervimeter reified centimeters as a metric unit to be used for the measurement of labor (rather than merely an ordinal approximation of one feature) and enabled the later transformation of Friedman’s Curve from a graphical tool which was meant to conform to women into a tool which was used to conform them.
Period7 May 2025 → 9 May 2025
Visiting fromDurham University (United Kingdom)
Visitor degreePhD

UN SDGs

This activity contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being

Related content