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I just finished reading Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix. It's a harrowing read, and I feel much more educated on pregnancy and how unwed mothers were treated in the days before legal abortion. But one thing about the story kept niggling at me. It's set in Florida in 1969, and measurements were referred to in metric. As in, how many litres of blood in a human body, and how many centimeters a cervix is dilated.
Now, maybe it's different in the medical profession, but metric wasn't introduced in Canada until the 70s when I was a little kid. And as far as I know, Americans still haven't adopted the metric system for whatever reason.
Sooo... was this something the editors didn't catch, or am I wrong about metric not being used in 1969 Florida?
#metric #medicine #Books #obstetrics #MedicalHistory
@Shanmonster metric has been commonly used in medicine in the US as far back as I can remember (about 6 decades, or 5 dozen if you prefer). You don't get a quart of blood, you get a liter. The surgeon's incision is described in centimeters. That pill you take has 100 milligrams of active ingredient. At the front-end, the patient reports being X feet tall weighing Y lbs, but the back-end records indicate cm and kg.
@Qbitzerre thank you so much! Appreciated.
@Shanmonster lots of medical stuff in the US is in metric because of its easy conversions between units. Cervix dialation also definitely still is in centimeters. Medicine is in milligrams, cc/cubic centimetres, or ml/millilitre etc @Szescstopni
@mycrowgirl @Shanmonster I had no idea! I just took a quick look at the web – it's fascinating that US medical professionals talk between themselves in kilograms but convert to pounds when facing patients :) In hindsight this is natural – business would be more complicated if you had to make two different models of the same USG, one for the US, one for the rest of the world (even if it only meant software, and yes, I am aware of differences in voltages, plugs etc.)