If a pregnant woman dies slowly, the fetus in her womb is likely to die owing to lack of oxygen; if she dies suddenly, the child may live for variable periods in various cases. Brotherton reported a case where a living child was taken from a woman twenty-three minutes after the death of the mother. Tarnier, the noted French obstetrician, told of a remarkable incident which happened in Paris during the rioting by the Commune after the war of 1870. The rioters fired on a maternity hospital, and a pregnant woman sitting on a bed in a ward was instantly killed by a bullet through her head. After a while she was discovered dead, and Tarnier was sent for to save the fetus, as its heart-sounds could be heard through the abdominal wall. When he began the operation the hospital was fired upon again, and it was necessary to carry the corpse to the cellar of the building. There Tarnier, an hour and three quarters at least after the death of the women, extracted a living child from the corpse. Hirst[74] tells of another case which was narrated to him by an American naval surgeon who saw it in the harbor of Rio Janeiro during the revolution at the beginning of the present republic of Brazil. A woman near term was killed instantly by a piece of shell. As soon as she fell to the ground a Brazilian surgeon, who was standing near by, cut open her abdomen with a penknife and drew out the child, but it was already dead. [74] _A Textbook of Obstetrics_, 7th ed., p. 643. Philadelphia, 1912. Mack[75] was called to a pregnant woman, and he found she had died suddenly about five minutes before he arrived. He at once opened the uterus with a small lancet and extracted a child which was beyond the livid stage and had no heart-sound. He worked on the child for forty minutes, using the ordinary methods for reviving asphyxiated children, but got no sign of life. Then he injected a hypodermic syringeful of a 1:1000 epinephrin solution through the umbilical cord into the abdomen and continued the reviving motions. In ten minutes the child was crying vigorously, and it was a healthy baby afterward. [75] _Journal of the American Medical Association_, August 28, 1915.