Dissertations / by eminent members of the Royal Medical Society.

  • Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dissertations / by eminent members of the Royal Medical Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    pregnancy the child is no bigger than usual, or is even smaller than ordinary. ' Although in some of the cases of protracted gestation,' says Dr. Mont- gomery, ' the child was of enormous size, it by no means follows that it should be so in all such instances ; and, in point of fact, we find it expressly mentioned in some of them that the child was smaller than usual, as happened in one of Dr. Hamilton's cases ; and Fodere says that in three instances in which gestation was evidently pro- longed, the children were undersized and ill-thriven ; while, on the other hand, the largest children are often produced where no extension of the term could have taken place.' Dr. Biu:ns also says that ' some causes which we cannot explain nor discover have the power of retarding the process (of gestation), the woman carrying the child longer than nine months ; and the child, when born, being not larger than the average size.' In further corroboration of these views the valuable observations on cows and mares by Tessier and Spencer have been cited as showing that there was no marked coincidence of increase of size and weight of the foetus with protraction of gestation. But this reasoning from analogy between the cow and the woman appears to be very much overstretched; and there are evident reasons for expecting, a priori, that the period of gestation in women should be limited on the side of protrac- tion more than in the lower animals. Of these the strongest is based on a consideration of the adapta- tion of the well-developed nine-month foetal head to the maternal passages, and the evils that are so well known to result from even slight disproportion between them. And unless it be supposed that