Halfway through the 20th century, views on pain in labour encompassed almost everything from women's self-blame to blaming nurses, midwives, doctors or partners for 'bad experiences'. Soon after that, giving birth came to be seen - in some settings and by some caregivers - as a 'natural' and thus benign event which women could 'master'. In their recent systematic review of women's expectations ...

developed midwifery, that the U.S.A. had developed nursing, but that Britain had managed to combine them in the way that was needed. Accordingly, she and her nurses took midwifery training in London. But she was also convinced that the nurse-midwife could and should combine sick nursing and preventive work, something that many Britons, then and now, see as far from ideal. We could do worse than...

This paper discusses fuzzy reasoning for approximately realizing nonlinear functions by a small number of fuzzy if-then rules with different specificity levels. Our fuzzy rule base is a mixture of general and specific rules, which overlap with each other in the input space. General rules work as default rules in our fuzzy rule base. First we briefly describe existing approaches to the handling ...

In the realm of multi-axial ratcheting, a step by step mathematical approach is developed for the parameter determination of decomposed kinematic hardening rules. For this purpose, key characteristics are mathematically derived for these hardening rules under multi-axial loading. These characteristics are then utilized to develop expressions which relate the loading history to the accumulated p...

In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy expert system for detection of Coronary Artery Disease, using cuckoo search algorithm. This system includes three phases: firstly, at the stage of fuzzy system design, a decision tree is used to extract if-then rules which provide the crisp rules required for Coronary Artery Disease detection. Secondly, the fuzzy system is formed by setting the intervals ...