Schultze's Swings

The sketch in Dr Hugh Gillies’ medical notebook depicts an alarming technique for resuscitating babies. 

Bernhard Schultze introduced it in 1871. An asphyxiated newborn baby would be swung by the armpits to force air into its lungs. By 1893 this method was being taught to medical students.

The Hold

The doctor stands, legs apart, holding the newborn baby vertically, face forward. His thumbs are flat across the baby's chest, his fingers under its armpits, supporting its back and head.

Upward Swing

The doctor swings the baby upward, where the momentum causes the lower body to fold against the abdomen. This would expel any amniotic fluid, mucus, or air from the lungs.

Downward Swing

He then swings the baby down again. As its body straightens, the chest expands and air is drawn into the lungs. This intense swinging would be carried out twenty times a minute until the baby started to breathe.

Some doctors praised the technique as a means of clearing airways, but critics warned of the significant dangers - internal trauma, hypothermia, and the risks of dropping a slippery newborn baby. By the 1920s the method had been abandoned. 

Hugh Gillies was twenty three years old when he attended the lecture at Glasgow’s Anderson College and recorded the technique in his notebook. We may never know what he thought about it. But this was a time when the frontiers of Victorian medicine were rapidly expanding.