Memoir on the sex of the child as a cause of difficulty and danger in human parturition / by J.Y. Simpson.

  • Simpson, James Young, 1811-1870.
Date:
[1844]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoir on the sex of the child as a cause of difficulty and danger in human parturition / by J.Y. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    elude, on the other hand, all those that perished, however shortly before, under the influence of other morbific agents than the ef¬ fects of labour. The fact of the still-born children being 44 pu¬ trid,” shows generally that death has occurred several days at least before birth. It is a condition which has enabled us therefore to exclude most, but not all, of those who had died antecedently to the commencement of actual labour. I repeat that, if we had possessed the power of excluding all—and thus so far improving our data—the proportion of male to female children who died during labour (high as we have shown it to be,) would, in all pro¬ bability, have been found raised still higher. Sixth Proposition. Of those children that are horn alive, more males than females are seen to suffer from the morbid states and injuries resulting from parturition. Among the accidents and injuries to the child, more imme¬ diately resulting from parturition, no one has, of late years, been made the subject of such minute pathological investigation as the 44 bloody tumour” or 44 ecchymosis” of the head,—the Cephalce- matoma neonatorum of Naegele, Yalleix, Dubois, Walshe, and various other modern authors. 44 The unequal pressure,” says Velpeau, 44 which the cranium experiences, and the tendency that its bones have to over-ride one another, during most labours, when the head is traversing the pelvis, and whether the labour be natural or artificial, is incontestibly the most common cause of this tumour.” (Traite Complet des Accouchmens, Tom. ii. p. 594.) No author, that I am acquainted with, has given any statistics regarding the sexes of the infants affected with cephalo- matomata, with the exception of Burchard. The data which he adduces are not so extensive as could be wished, but still they furnish strong and indubitable proof of our present position. In his essay, 44 De tumore cranii recens-natorum sanguineo,” he men¬ tions that out of 43 cases, which he had observed at the Breslaw Hospital, the child was male in 34 and female in 9 of the in¬ stances, so that the relative frequency of the disease in the two sexes stood thus :— Male Children. Female Children. Proportion of Males to Females. 34 9 377 to 100 I am not aware that there has been hitherto published such data regarding serous swellings of the infant’s scalp (the caput