The diagnosis of pregnancy is a subject well worthy of the student's most serious attention; for he will of course be liable, when in practice, to be called upon to give his evidence before a court of justice under circumstances when the responsibility must ever be of the most serious and not unfrequently of the most fearful nature, the more so as the old custom of impanelling a jury of "twelve discreet matrons" to determine whether the woman be _quick with child_ has fallen deservedly into disrepute. He should lose no opportunity of making himself familiar with the various symptoms of pregnancy above enumerated, and of so practising the different senses of hearing, touch, and sight, as instantly and certainly to detect their presence. Numerous cases are on record, where a false diagnosis in women convicted of capital offences, has led to most lamentable results, and where dissection of the body after death has shown that she was pregnant. Dr. Evory Kennedy has recorded an interesting case of this sort which occurred at Norwich in 1833, when a pregnant woman was on the point of being executed through the ignorance of a female jury. (E. Kennedy's _Observations on Obstetric Auscultation_, &c., p. 197.) We may also mention a dreadful case of this nature which occurred to the celebrated Baudelocque at Paris, during the horrors of the French revolution.[45] A young French countess was imprisoned during the revolution, being suspected of carrying on a treasonable correspondence with her husband, an emigrant. She was condemned, but declared herself pregnant; two of the best midwives in Paris were ordered to examine her, and they declared that she was not pregnant. She was accordingly guillotined, and her body taken to the school of anatomy, where it was opened by Baudelocque, who found twins in the fifth month of pregnancy.