It is often difficult to know when most developments in medicine actually begin. They tend to evolve and many people will claim the credit of being the first to make the breakthrough. With Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynaecology there is no such doubt for it had a very definite beginning with the1958 classic Lancet paper (Donald et al., 1958) by Ian Donald, John McVicar, and Tom Brown “The investigation of abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound”. Actually this is an unfortunate title because it does not identify what was truly unique about the paper which is that it was entirely devoted to ultrasound studies in clinical obstetrics and gynaecology and contained the first ultrasound images of the fetus and also gynaecological masses. The other unique feature was that these were the first images taken with a compound contact scanner which was the first practical scanning machine.

All developments of ultrasound diagnosis (or Sonography) in Obstetrics and Gynecology date from this seminal paper and this short history is a personal evaluation of the subsequent timeline of key events and breakthroughs up to the present time.