I’m a member of the CPR teaching team at my school. We’re Red Cross certified as instructors, and we teach CPR to various groups throughout the year: incoming first-years, rising third-years about to go into the hospitals for clerkships, and laypeople attending Mini Med School.
During orientation this month I taught groups of first years. I had a good time and got to meet quite a few of my new schoolmates. And it’s a fun class to teach because there are a lot of opportunities for jokes, and I like making people laugh.
I noticed something amusing during this running of the course. Partway through the class, I hand out several baby-sized manikins to practice infant rescue breaths and CPR. After they’ve practiced I lecture a little more before we go on to the next skill, so the “babies” are floating around among the students. It’s funny to watch what they do with them.
About a third of the students cuddle them, holding them as they’d hold actual human babies. This doesn’t appear intentional - they’re not playing with the dolls, just automatically holding them. These individuals are approximately half male and half female.
Another third or so play with the manikins in ways that would likely cause shaken baby syndrome in real infants - holding them by the ankle, tossing them back and forth, that sort of thing. The majority of these students are male, but females are well-represented as well.
Most of the remaining students ignore the dolls once they’ve finished practicing on them.
But there are always one or two students who take the manikins apart (the faces come off and there are removable sponge “lungs”) to find out how they work. These students - both males and females - are almost invariably former engineering majors.