Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth Hardcover – March 24, 2009
So began Mark Sloan’s three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly three thousand births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas. In Birth Day, Sloan draws on his personal and professional experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and culture into a fascinating—and often funny—tapestry of this fundamental human passage.
Birth Day takes the reader on a remarkable journey, from the dawn of human history to the quiet efficiency of a modern operating room; from Aristotle and Julius Caesar to a trailblazing, cross-dressing British army surgeon; from a recent past filled with the horrors of childbirth gone wrong to a present day, in which every pregnancy is expected to end happily. Some of Birth Day’s many topics include
• The evolution of human childbirth—or, why do gorillas have it so easy?
• The first five minutes of life—scuba divers, astronauts, and the amazing adaptations that transform a fetus into an air-breathing, out-in-the-world baby
• Cesarean section—a look at its origins, its future, and how it came to be the most frequently performed operation in American hospitals
• Pain and politics—the age-old quest for painless childbirth, starring Adam and Eve, Queen Victoria, a nineteenth-century medical brawl, and the rise of today’s “epidural monoculture”
• Daddies—raging paternal hormones, hidden anxieties, and the emotional evolution of men (including the author, his father, and grandfather) as they approach fatherhood
• The five senses at birth—does light enter the womb? how loud is it in there? what is a newborn baby searching for with those first anxious glances?
• A tour of the newborn body—springy skulls, hairy ears, innies and outies, the advantages (and disadvantages) of looking like your father, and why the United States is one of the world’s most circumcised nations
Delightfully instructive and entertaining, Birth Dayoffers a fresh, sometimes irreverent take on a universally familiar topic. Warm, reassuring, and packed with stories from the author’s work and life, this unique book is one pediatrician’s meditation on the hiding-in-plain-sight marvels of human birth.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateMarch 24, 2009
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.6 inches
- ISBN-100345502868
- ISBN-13978-0345502865
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Review
“In Birth Day, Sloan skillfully blends personal anecdote, hard science, and bizarre historical detail to deliver a fertile and amusing account of the womb-to-world journey that every one of us has made. Without a doubt, this book will educate, entertain, and prompt you to call your mother in gratitude.”—Katrina Firlik, M.D., author of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe
“No one has described the intricate timing and sequence of a baby’s miracle transition from inside its mother to breathing on its own more clearly or beautifully than Dr. Mark Sloan. Sloan covers the various approaches to pain management during labor and their effects on both mother and child, and he supports adding nitrous oxide–safe and widely used for labor in so many other countries–to the very limited alternatives now available to women in America.” —Judith Pence Rooks, CNM, MPH, author of Midwifery and Childbirth in America
“I have given birth twice but until this book never grasped the true wonder of what happens to mother and child during childbirth. An amazing, tender, funny book about our bigheaded species.” —Adair Lara, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go
“Birth Day is a wonderful book. Dr. Sloan has accomplished the impossible, combining the history, biology, sociology, and medicine of childbirth into an informative, yet amusing story. Expectant parents will find this book useful and reassuring. So will physicians..”—Donald Caton, M.D., Emeritus Professor of Anesthesia, University of Florida, and author of What a Blessing She Had Chloroform
"In Birth Day, Dr. Mark Sloan delivers a rare and compelling blend of humor, compassion, insight, and scholarship- all swaddled in a remarkably engaging literary style. As illiuminating as it is fun, this book shines a gentle light into all the nooks and crannies of what must be the most universally familiar of all great mysteries: the act of being born. I heartily recommend the book to everyone who has ever played a role in that act, birthers and brithees alike! You'll learn a lot- I did- and it won't hurt a bit."—David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP Director, Prevention Research Center, Yale University School of Medicine
“Over three thousand births later, Dr. Mark Sloan has lived to tell—and tell beautifully. At once decoding the mystery of childbirth while preserving its wonder,Birth Day is saturated with scholarship, humor, and heart.”—Linda Phillips, author of Sweet Remedy
"What boosts Sloan’s book above other pediatrician memoirs is his Captain Kangaroo–like humor and compassion. After attending roughly 3,000 births, and tending the medical needs of countless other children and their moms, he seems outstandingly suited to his specialty. The topics he discusses were born, if you will, out of his own experience, professional and personal, so in talking about them, he combines anecdotes and overviews of the various aspects of fetal development and birthing. With its crisp and upbeat tone, Sloan’s book is good company for parents experienced and prospective alike."—Booklist
"[Sloan] marvelously captures the precarious nature of childbirth—both its joys and its anxieties—while treating readers to an informal and captivating history of the medical practices surrounding birth in America… [He] ranges surely and splendidly.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Sloan, who practices in Northern California, is a graceful writer, and his narrative, like the works of Jerome Groopman, flows easily between memoir, anecdotal reporting and hard science… Given the subject, "Birth Day" has a natural audience in curious, new and expectant parents. But anyone interested in the complex and, yes, miraculous way we all make it into this world will find lots to wonder over and ponder here, too." –Washington Post
About the Author
From The Washington Post
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Twenty Babies: An Unexpectedly Quick Introduction to Vaginal Birth
I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school. At that point I was toying with the idea of becoming a family practitioner or a general surgeon. Babies didn’t much figure into my future.
This is how my obstetrics rotation was supposed to work: a medical student was typically paired with an intern, who in turn was under the direct supervision of a senior resident. The senior resident did the complicated cases—forceps deliveries, cesarean sections, and such—while the intern handled the routine vaginal births. My role as a medical student was more or less like Cinderella’s in her pre-princess days: do the dirty work, like IV starts and blood draws, and stay in the shadows to avoid the wrath of the overworked intern and resident. A “good” student—one with the sense to do his work quietly while openly admiring the skills of his elders—could expect the chance to deliver an uncomplicated baby or two as his reward.
Two things conspired to make this particular rotation different. The first was that it was early July, a traditionally scary time to have a baby in a large teaching hospital, since the interns are only a week out of medical school and generally have less experience delivering babies than the women whose babies they’re delivering. The second thing was that, for reasons I can’t recall, the OB resident staff was a few bodies short of a full complement. This meant that the interns and residents had to cover many more patients than usual, which didn’t leave them much time for supervising green medical students embarking on their first hospital rotation.
And so one sweltering Chicago morning I stood in my crinkly white coat before Mitch, a stocky, gruff senior resident with a startled head of jet-black hair and a permanent dusting of cigarette ash down the front of his scrubs. We were in the hallway outside the maternity ward. Gurneys with moaning women aboard rattled by like Model Ts on an assembly line, pushed by a corps of tough-looking nurses. Mitch had paused between a C-section and a vaginal birth to give me my orders: I was to join Ben, a brand-new intern from a tony private medical school, on what Mitch called the “firing line”—a row of wheeled labor beds separated by unadorned canvas curtains.
Mitch clamped his hand on my upper arm like a bailiff leading a felon into court and marched me through the labor room’s swinging doors to Bed 4, where a tiny nurse with Popeyesque forearms was helping a hugely pregnant woman out of a wheelchair.
“Okay, you had some OB training in your physical assessment class, right?” Mitch asked. No, I told him, I hadn’t. My physical assessment class had been at the veterans’ hospital down the street. There, I had watched men with terminal lung cancer chain-smoke cigarettes through their tracheostomy tubes, had seen others who had lost limbs to diabetes or D-Day land mines, and had personally examined what a senior resident described as the case of the year—a cabdriver who got scurvy (scurvy!) from a decades-long diet of plain White Castle hamburgers and Coke, period. Not only had I not seen a baby born at the VA, I told Mitch, I hadn’t seen a single female patient. The woman climbing onto the bed in front of us would be the first woman I had ever touched with medical intent.
Mitch scratched the stubble on his cheek. “Well, you’ve read about childbirth, haven’t you?” I said that I had. Just the night before, in fact: half a chapter, with diagrams. Took me twenty minutes.
“No problem, then.” He slapped me on the back. “Just sit there”—he motioned me to a rolling stool between the woman’s now propped-up legs—”and call me when you see a head.” Then he left.
I sat there for two hours. I killed time by rearranging the contents of my pockets, cleaning my stethoscope, and, once I had overcome my shyness, talking to the woman who was to produce the head I had been ordered to be on the lookout for.
Her name was Tonya. She was two months younger than I was, and in between contractions I learned that for the last five years she’d been a secretary at an insurance company downtown. This was her third child—her oldest, a girl, was just two and a half—and she absolutely hated childbirth. She compared the pain of having a baby to the pain of being stabbed, which she had been, twice—both times being cases of mistaken identity, she assured me. But childbirth was worse, she said, because “it’s like they won’t take the knife out.” Childbirth and knifing: two experiences I had never had. I took Tonya’s word for it.
Our conversation gave way to long stretches of silence as Tonya’s labor intensified. She panted as her contractions came, her hands gripping the metal siderails of the bed with such force that I thought she’d bend them. Between contractions she stroked her belly with her hands, her eyes closed.
Ben, the intern, came and went in a sweaty blur, muttering to himself as he lurched up and down the row of beds. He shook my hand on one pass. “Everything okay here?” he asked in a strangled voice. “Good,” he said absently, not waiting for an answer. He patted my shoulder and scuttled out the labor room door. I went back to my pockets, moving my reflex hammer, tuning fork, pens, and alcohol wipes from one side to the other and back again while I waited for something to happen.
A sudden eruption of curses drew my attention. Startled, I looked down between Tonya’s legs and saw the top of a tiny head peeking out from her vagina. I shouted for Mitch and then Ben, but neither responded. The nurse who’d been working the firing line was gone, too—off helping them, I supposed.
A pale student nurse appeared behind her clipboard at the foot of Tonya’s bed. “I think they’re doing an operation,” she said. Her eyes widened at the sight of Tonya’s baby’s head. “Maybe I should go look for them?” She dropped her clipboard in my lap and took off at a half-trot. The double doors swung shut behind her. Now it was just me, the swearing Tonya, and the top third of a birthing baby’s head.
I remembered a picture in my night-before’s reading where the obstetrician has his hand placed confidently on the emerging newborn’s head. So I did that. I put my gloved right hand on Tonya’s baby’s head. It was warm and wet, and squishier than I had imagined it would be. Contact made, I exhaled for the first time in what seemed like an eternity.
My relief was short-lived. I had mastered the art of placing my hand on a birthing baby’s head, but what came next? Would the baby just kind of fall out of Tonya on its own, I wondered, or was I supposed to grab on to that puckered patch of scalp and pull? I silently cursed myself for not finishing the chapter. Caught between pulling and not pulling, I chose a middle, temporizing route. Like the Dutch boy at the dike, I put my hand on the baby’s head and pushed back, hoping to persuade it to pause just long enough for Mitch or Ben to come and save me.
Tonya’s curses were getting personal now. She had finished damning her absent husband for putting her through this agony not once, not twice, but three times, and now she turned her attention to me. “Get that damn baby out of me!” she shrieked, glaring at me over the top of her belly. “Get it out now or I’ll cut you!”
Dutch boy be damned. I was losing the battle. There was now an entire head under my hand, face and all. Amniotic fluid bubbled from its nose. Its mouth opened and closed in some horrible parody of breathing. Caught between threats of mayhem and my feeble attempt to hold back eons of childbirthing evolution, I closed my eyes and surrendered myself to whatever came next.
Suddenly a pair of hands pushed me aside. Mitch reached in, grabbed the baby’s head and yanked with so much force that I was afraid he was going to tear it off. He pulled the head sharply downward—the right shoulder appeared at the top of the birth canal—then up, and the left shoulder popped out from below. The rest of the body followed, like a rabbit pulled from a magician’s hat. Mitch plopped the baby in my lap—a big, squalling, slippery boy—and then clamped the cord with a pair of long hemostats and cut it in two. A minute later he tugged on the remnant of the umbilical cord and out came the placenta.
A nurse wrapped the baby in a white receiving blanket and handed him to Tonya, who cried and smiled and cootchie-cooed her thirdborn, seeming to have forgotten for the moment about killing me. His name was Robert, she said, because he had his grandfather’s cleft chin.
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” said Mitch, as he jotted a note on Tonya’s chart. I didn’t answer him—couldn’t, really. I just sat on the stool with my mouth hanging open, dumbstruck. My scrub shirt was soaked in sweat. There was blood on my socks and shoes. Mitch stripped off his gloves and tossed them in a trash can at the foot of Tonya’s bed. He yanked me into the hall, where two more mothers-to-be in wheelchairs waited. “Okay, then,” he announced. “Time for the next one.”
Had I been a little more observant—and less panicked—I would have noticed that Robert’s head had rotated one way as I held it, and then back again as his body emerged. I would have pondered the pushing, pulling, and pain of having a baby, and the torpedoish shape of the baby’s head as he lay in my lap. I would have marveled at Tonya’s rapid...
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; 1st edition (March 24, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345502868
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345502865
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,608,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,822 in Pregnancy & Childbirth (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

I have been a pediatrician for almost 30 years, during which time I have had to convince people that I am neither a) Dick Van Dyke, who played Dr. Mark Sloan on Diagnosis Murder in the 1990s, nor b) Eric Dane, who currently plays a sleazy plastic surgeon version of Dr. Mark Sloan on Grey's Anatomy. I don't know what it is about my name and TV doctors...
I live in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour north of San Francisco, among the redwoods, cows and vineyards. Elisabeth and I have been married for 24 years, and we have two teengers, who continue to provide me with a wealth of hands-on pediatric experience...
My writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune (including an essay about lessons I learned while falling out of moving cars as a kid), the San Francisco Chronicle, and Notre Dame Magazine, among other publications. "Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History and the Wonder of Childbirth" is my first book.
Birth Day is partly a memoir of my professional career and my experiences as a dad, and partly an exploration of the fascinating story of how humans came to give birth the way we do. There's a lot of humor in it as well.
Birth Day has gotten a large number of great reviews - from The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly (a starred review), The New England Journal of Medicine, and Fit Pregnancy Magazine (5 stars), among many others. I'm getting very nice reader responses as well, which I love to receive. It's great to hear from readers!
I hope you enjoy Birth Day!
Mark Sloan MD
My author website and contact info:
marksloanmd.com
Customer reviews
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star5 star83%14%3%0%0%83%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star4 star83%14%3%0%0%14%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star3 star83%14%3%0%0%3%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star2 star83%14%3%0%0%0%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star1 star83%14%3%0%0%0%
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book informative and well-researched. They describe the writing style as witty, engaging, and humorous. The book is considered a good read for expecting mothers, providing an in-depth discussion of pregnancy and infant development. Readers praise the author's warmth and compassion.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book informative and well-researched. They appreciate the insightful anecdotes and careful historical research. The book is suitable for anyone interested in the history of medicine and birth.
"...that are often hilarious, but the book is filled with a wonderful history of child birth, surveying practices from all regions of the world...." Read more
"...Filled with both insightful anecdotes and careful historical research, it's an informative and very fun read...." Read more
"...Dr. Mark Sloan skillfully combines scientific knowledge and medical history with personal anecdote to make for an informative and entertaining read...." Read more
"A real page-turning read, Birth Day is equally entertaining and informative. Easily this soon to be parent's favorite "baby" book!" Read more
Customers find the writing style engaging and witty. They describe it as informative with a good sense of humor and compassion.
"...This well-written, well-researched book doesn't come across as having a strong agenda, neither pro-medicine nor pro-home birth, but rather gives a..." Read more
"...history with personal anecdote to make for an informative and entertaining read...." Read more
"A real page-turning read, Birth Day is equally entertaining and informative. Easily this soon to be parent's favorite "baby" book!" Read more
"...I love Dr. Mark Sloan's writing style, he is funny and entertaining while describing the otherwise dry history and science of subjects such as labor..." Read more
Customers find the book informative and engaging for expecting mothers. It covers the history of birth and provides scientific explanations about how the fetus develops before birth. Readers appreciate the clear, easy-to-understand writing style and interesting facts about infant development.
"...Birth Day is must reading for all pregnant women and fathers-to-be as well as for women like myself who have given birth to two children but who..." Read more
"...delivery has changed throughout the years and scientific explanations about how the fetus grows and develops to survive life outside of the womb...." Read more
"...This was my favorite of my pregnancy related reading, and I will now be buying this book to share with friends who are expecting...." Read more
"...a quick and easy read and covered aspects of birth, culture, and infant development that I had not considered or heard about before." Read more
Customers find the book highly readable and not too technical. They describe it as an engaging read with interesting content about pregnancy.
".../birth books I've read since I got pregnant, this was by far the best written. Dr. Sloan had me (and my husband) laughing every couple of pages...." Read more
"...I enjoyed the writing style of this book. It was a quick and easy read and covered aspects of birth, culture, and infant development that I had not..." Read more
"Fascinating, highly readable and not too technical book about pregnancy and how babies develop before birth...." Read more
"...' birth books, I loved this social history, autobiography, newsy, discursive book...." Read more
Customers like the author's warmth and compassion. They mention the book is informative with history, science, and anecdotes from a pediatrician.
"Part wonderful memoir by a warm-hearted pediatrician, but a really informationally rich discussion of birth, and the many decisions new parents will..." Read more
"...packed with information AND told with a fine sense of humor and compassion. Great fun to learn so much while reading a well written book." Read more
"...anecdotes to examine some very controversial topics with logic and compassion." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2013A friend recommended this book when we told him we were expecting. No comments or summaries, just "read it". We looked it up. A book about childbirth by a male pediatrician. No thanks. I wasn't interested in more anecdotal fluff about the wonders of childbirth. My husband decided to check out the preview chapter one evening, and that's all it took to get us hooked.
Yes, there are anecdotal stories that are often hilarious, but the book is filled with a wonderful history of child birth, surveying practices from all regions of the world. The author paints vivid pictures of the days of "Twilight Sleep" and the rise of the natural birth movement. Beyond that, he incorporates actual facts and data from peer-reviewed medical journals citing the benefits of doulas (I hadn't even heard the term before) and surveying the "good enough" pain relief options available to women outside the US (or in one of five hospitals nationally).
This well-written, well-researched book doesn't come across as having a strong agenda, neither pro-medicine nor pro-home birth, but rather gives a complete picture allowing a woman to make her own decisions. We both learned a great deal about our upcoming adventure, and I actually feel a lot better for it. I highly recommend this book to every expectant mom and dad, to every OB, midwife and doula, and to anyone else fascinated by the progress of medicine in the past century.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2009Of the half dozen baby/birth books I've read since I got pregnant, this was by far the best written. Dr. Sloan had me (and my husband) laughing every couple of pages. Filled with both insightful anecdotes and careful historical research, it's an informative and very fun read. Unlike most pregnancy/birth/baby books, it's downright hard to put down. It's also the single book that best educated me on what I might expect of a hospital birth and on the origins of today's hospital culture. There are plenty of books out there by "natural" birth advocates to describe birth at home or in a hippie commune, but a relative scarcity of hospital birth stories. Through his anecdotes, Dr. Sloan finally answered the questions I had as a first-time mom.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2009From beginning to end, Birth Day is jam-packed with information about childbirth and a baby's first day of life. Dr. Mark Sloan skillfully combines scientific knowledge and medical history with personal anecdote to make for an informative and entertaining read. Be prepared to learn quirky facts about why and when women began to lie down to give birth, what a fetus senses inside the womb, and what it's like to enter a world of bright lights and giddy chatter, to useful information about C-sections and epidurals. Birth Day is must reading for all pregnant women and fathers-to-be as well as for women like myself who have given birth to two children but who had only rudimentary knowledge of childbearing. Time spent with Dr. Sloan is like having another obstetrician and pediatrician there to answer many of the questions your doctor doesn't have time for. Birth Day is full of wit, tender stories and wisdom. Do not give birth without it!
- Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2013A real page-turning read, Birth Day is equally entertaining and informative. Easily this soon to be parent's favorite "baby" book!
- Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2011I LOVE this book. I am about to deliver my first child in just a few weeks, and for the last 9 months I have read dozens of books on pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing. Birth Day is such a refreshingly un-biased, interesting read. I love Dr. Mark Sloan's writing style, he is funny and entertaining while describing the otherwise dry history and science of subjects such as labor pain relief. His insight really makes me feel like I know what I am in for when begining labor.
I am currently only halfway through the book, but since I could go into labor any time, I wanted to get a review in while there was still time. If you are like me and like to gather all the information you can without a personal agenda of the autor clouding the facts, you might really enjoy this book.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2015I bought this book when I first found out that I was pregnant based on its reviews. The reviews don't disappoint! I have 3 months to go and am actually re-reading this book since I enjoyed it so much. It is humorous, informative and well-researched. I loved learning about how delivery has changed throughout the years and scientific explanations about how the fetus grows and develops to survive life outside of the womb. Dr. Sloan's stories about his first experiences watching and assisting during labor and delivery had me laughing out loud. I'd recommend this book to anyone expecting a baby and anyone in the medical profession. I recently purchased a second copy to give to my Lamaze instructor.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2016I was engrossed in this book and learned so much. This was my favorite of my pregnancy related reading, and I will now be buying this book to share with friends who are expecting. Sloan has such an engaging, personal approach that weaves his own professional and family experiences along with well-researched scientific and historical information about birth culture. I gave a copy book as a Christmas gift to my mother, a nurse trained in the 1960s, and she wished she had access to it years ago.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2012As someone who enjoys reading nonfiction, history, sociology, etc. I enjoyed the writing style of this book. It was a quick and easy read and covered aspects of birth, culture, and infant development that I had not considered or heard about before.
Top reviews from other countries
PhobosReviewed in Canada on December 26, 20145.0 out of 5 stars My favourite birth-related book
A wonderful book on pregnancy, birth and newborn by a father and a pediatrician. It is easy to read with a great mix of history, information and heart-warming anecdotes. It would be a great gift for the parents-to-be or anybody who would like to learn more about birth.
Mikayla BanmanReviewed in Canada on January 4, 20204.0 out of 5 stars Fun and Educational Read
This was the first book I read on the history of birth in the Western world. I was fascinated with the details the author included and enjoyed the humor he infused into the writing. I learned a lot and had a good time in the process. The only negative part for me was mine and the author's differing views on human evolution.
