Childbirth.

Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Childbirth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

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    and healthy state, we have reason to believe that these functions would be attended with little, if any pain. But the healthy tone of the nervous system is destroyed. Diseased, convulsed, and erratic action is established by the various abuses of civic life, and the most tender and endearing of all relations becomes a horror and a curse. I know many mothers who, with their husbands, have adopted the ' Graham System,' or in other words, those correct habits recommended in these lectures; (that is, attention to diet, exercise, and bathing freely and con- stantly with pure cold water,) and these mothers] have abridged their sufferings in parturition from forty hours to one hour, and have escaped altogether the deathly sickness of the three first months of gestation. But they avoided all excesses as far as possible. We know that the Indians, the lower orders of Irish, and the slaves at the South, suffer very little in childbearing. Why is this ? God made us all of one blood. Is it not that these, living in a less artificial manner, taking much exercise in the open air, and living temperately, have obeyed more of the laws of their being, and consequently do not suffer the penalty of violated laws, as do our vic- tims of civilization ? A manuscript, containing an account of the progress and successful termination of an experiment for secur- ing childbirth with safety, and almost without pain, pub- lished in London, 1841, by S. Rowbotham, author of an Essay on Human Parturition, &;c. was sent to the writer, requesting her to add her views on the subject, and to prepare it for publication. The request was cheerfully complied with, in view of improving the opportunity of collecting and arranging ia