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"I tried to relieve my guilt by reminding myself to be grateful for modern medicine – at least he wasn’t removed with a crochet hook – but forceps aren’t modern. Nor do they feel modern. They feel like what they are: a product of 18th-century male practitioners’ devotion to metallic reason and elegance in all things. I had spent years in the archives trying to gain some intimacy with the past, and suddenly there I was, being penetrated by the Enlightenment."
