A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a MidwifeNihell, Elizabeth
History
A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a Midwife
Nihell, Elizabeth
Midwifery -- Early works to 1800; Obstetrics -- Early works to 1800
“AFTER that (says M. De la Motte) I gave it some gentle shakes, and even
pulled it pretty hard, and had several tugs at it, to make an end of a
delivery I had so happily begun; but all was in vain. This obliged me,
according to my usual method, to put my finger into its mouth. I was
mistaken, for what I took to be the mouth, I found to be the nape of the
neck, and that the neck, not having followed the motion of the body, was
twisted round, and consequently the face still remained turned upwards,
so that the chin it was that, being hitched at the os pubis, was the
obstacle to have been conquered to terminate the delivery.”
MR. LEVRET here observes, there being a great probability that, when la
Motte turned the body of the child, he was pulling it towards him, and
that the mother was in a labor-throw: for it is well known, that then
the uterus contracts itself in all directions round the body it
contains: she was then compressing exactly the head of the child, which
must render it immoveable, while he was turning the body. These two
co-incidences must have contributed to twist the neck of the child,
consequently to make it lose its life. And to clench the misfortune, he
gave its little body to be held by the husband of the mother, while he
was pushing back the head with one hand, and with the other disingaging
the chin. He told the husband at the same time to pull softly; “but he
hauled with such violence, in the hope of easing his wife, that he fell
with a jerk six foot off the bed, with the body of the child, of which
the head had remained in the uterus.”
LET us proceed to the second example. This is the fact. M. De la Motte
tells us, that he was called to assist a poor woman in labor, in which
she had been lingering for two days, that this patient was a very little
woman, and of about forty five years of age; the arm of a very small
child had come out the day before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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