A medical instrument with two long handles and gripping ends, used to hold or extract things during surgery or childbirth.
From Latin 'forceps,' meaning tongs or pincers. The word comes from Latin 'formus' (warm) and 'capere' (to seize)—though this etymology is disputed, it's been used in medicine since Roman times.
Forceps revolutionized childbirth in the 1600s because they let doctors safely extract babies without killing the mother, which sounds obvious now but meant that millions of women who would have died suddenly survived—it's one of medicine's quiet miracles.
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