But the advantages of this remedy are not confined to lessening the pains of delivery. It prevents after pains; favours the easy and healthy secretion of milk; prevents sore breasts, swelled legs, puerperile fever, and all the distressing train of anomalous complaints that often follow child-bearing. Dr. Hunter informed his pupils, in his lectures upon midwifery, in the year 1769, that he had often observed the most rapid recoveries to succeed the most severe labours. The severity of the pains in these cases created a disease, which prevented internal congestions in the womb. Bleeding, by depleting the uterus, obviates at once both disease and congestion. Its efficacy is much aided by means of glysters, which, by emptying the lower bowels, lessen the pressure upon the uterus. Let it not be inferred, from what has been said in favour of blood-letting in parturition, that it is proper in all cases. Where there has been great previous inanition, and where there are marks of languor, and feeble morbid action in the system, the remedies should be of an opposite nature. Opium and other cordials are indicated in these cases. Their salutary effects in exciting the action of the uterus, and expediting delivery, are too well known to be mentioned. I have expressed a hope in another place[64], that a medicine would be discovered that should suspend sensibility altogether, and leave irritability, or the powers of motion, unimpaired, and thereby destroy labour pains altogether. I was encouraged to cherish this hope, by having known delivery to take place, in one instance, during a paroxysm of epilepsy, and having heard of another, during a fit of drunkenness, in a woman attended by Dr. Church, in both of which there was neither consciousness, nor recollection of pain. [64] Medical Repository, vol. vi. 2. During the period in which the menses are said to dodge, and for a year or two after they cease to flow, there is a morbid fulness and excitement in the blood-vessels, which are often followed by head-ach, cough, dropsy, hæmorrhages, glandular obstructions, and cancers. They may all be prevented by frequent and moderate bleedings. 3. It has been proved, by many facts, that opium, when taken in an excessive dose, acts by inducing a similar state of the system with that which is induced by the miasmata which bring on malignant and inflammatory fevers. The remedy for the disease produced by it (where a vomiting cannot be excited to discharge the opium) has been found to be copious blood-letting. Of its efficacy, the reader will find an account in four cases, published in the fifth volume of the New-York Medical Repository.