[Giving birth to medical instruments: forceps and pelvimeters among obstetricians of the 19th century in Mexico].

Up until the mid-19th century, Mexican obstetricians associated forceps and other surgical instruments with risky operations, considering them artefacts whose use was to be avoided at all cost. This article asks why by the century's end these same instruments had come to be seen as life-saving surgical utensils. To this end, I analyzed clinical narratives that defined the norms and practices of their use, discovering that although forceps were redefined by male-midwives' norms of prudence, they also introduced medically-based ideas of gender and race and attributed to Mexican women's pelvises a supposedly pathological nature.