_Differences in the process of Labor._--Although, in most cases, labor proceeds much in the way I have just explained, and is attended with similar phenomena, yet still we occasionally see marked exceptions. This is particularly the case with regard to _pain_. Most females suffer severely at this time, and some even the most torturing agony, while others again experience scarcely anything to complain of, and some even feel nothing at all. I am acquainted with a lady at the present time, the mother of several children, who assures me she never felt any pain at all in her labors, nor was she in any ways exhausted by them. I have known her rise from her bed in the night, from feeling indications of the approaching event, make all her arrangements, and send for the nurse, as if it was the most ordinary affair imaginable. On one of these occasions, before her husband returned with the assistants, she was delivered while alone, without any difficulty, and they found her sitting up in bed nursing the child. She had cut it loose, and tied up the cord herself, having heard how to do so at one of my Lectures, and actually brought away the Placenta with her own hand. In two days after she was about as usual. And yet this lady was by no means strong, nor remarkably healthy; and what is very singular, she suffered severe pains at most of her monthly periods; much more, as she assured me, than from all her labors put together. M. Chailly also mentions an instance of a young girl of sixteen, with her first pregnancy, whose Vagina was also partly closed by an internal membrane, whose delivery nevertheless was almost painless. She woke up, he tells us, about four o'clock in the morning, with some very slight pains, which scarcely disturbed her, but which continued till about six, when the child was born suddenly and safely, without any assistance, and with scarcely any increase of pain to the mother. I have known many other such cases as these, and plenty of them can be found recorded; but what this fortunate exemption from suffering, in such cases, depends upon, is not known. The nature, and the seat of the pains, is also very variable. Some only feel a dull sort of aching, with powerful contraction, or drawing together, while others call it _grinding_, _cutting_, and _burning_ pain. Some feel it in the back, and some at front, while others feel it most in the groins, and others again experience it in all these parts at once. The peculiar sharp pain which results from the extreme dilatation of the external mouth, when the head passes, is perhaps the most constantly felt, and the most alike in all.