Incubating the Transformation: Infant Incubators, Bricolage, and Medical Internationalism in the State Socialist Czechoslovakia
Abstract
In this paper, I explore the history of infant incubators as an essential commodity linked to perinatal care in the state socialist Czechoslovakia and medical internationalism. Perinatal care has been a crucial domain for any healthcare system, indicating its overall quality and ensuring the future of the society. In addition to contributing to better fertility rates by saving lives of newborns, infant incubators also carry important political message, which plays a role in humanitarian aid; the Czechs have been both donors and receivers of such aid.
At the end of 2022, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a press release titled "Czech
Infant Incubators Save Lives in Lebanon'. Yet just 13 years ago, Czech medical doctors complained about the shortage of high-tech infant incubators in maternity hospitals. 1 In fact, complaints about the lack of infant incubators have been recurring since the 1950s. However, in various eras these repetitive shortages reflected different shifts in the Czech(oslovak) birth care system and society.
After the Second World War, there was an urgent lack of incubators in maternity hospitals which were newly built across the country as part of more general healthcare reforms. 2 This incubator shortage persisted despite the 1947 US donation and an initiated local production of the Chirana company whose new incubators had to substitute the old ones invented by the Čížek brothers. In an era of postwar shortage, the Czechoslovak medical and technical experts together designed a
"simplified room infant incubator" for those newborns whose weight exceeded critical 2000 g. In response to a continuing shortage of this essential equipment saving lives of so-needed new citizens, the Czechoslovak medical doctors continued in subsequent decades. 3 As in the course of time the
Chirana incubators failed to provide sufficient quality, the Czechoslovak state invested an extraordinary amount of money to purchase Western models. Around the late 1970s and after, incubators together with foetal monitors and ultrasound machines constituted "a serious drain on foreign currency reserves".
My interest in infant incubators stems from my research on competing moral regimes that surround various birth alternatives in the Czechoslovak birth care system since the 1950s up to now.
Incubators epitomise the dominant moral regime and its emphasis on expert medical authority over childbirth and birthing women. This dominant moral regime has criticized the current state of healthcare for insufficient resources invested into medical technology and equipment. In contrast, an alternative moral regime has highlighted the women's and parents' agency in childbirth matters and criticized birth care providers for ignoring women's and new-born's psychological and emotional needs. Yet, many proponents of the alternative moral regime rarely belittle the incubators, which constitute an important pillar of new-born care being at the intersection of both moral regimes.