Abdominal and uterine tolerance in pregnant women : as shown by the low rate of mortality under severe lacerated and other wounds, the result of direct violence / by Robert P. Harris.

  • Harris, Robert P. (Robert Patterson), 1822-1899.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Abdominal and uterine tolerance in pregnant women : as shown by the low rate of mortality under severe lacerated and other wounds, the result of direct violence / by Robert P. Harris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    simultaneously, with very little loss of blood. The ball entered the foetus just below the left scapula, ranged diagonally through the trunk, and made its exit from the right hip. Peritonitis followed, and the woman made a narrow escape from death. She menstruated in four weeks and was well in a month. The ball was not found. From the small amount of liquor amnii lost in her labor it was thought to have drained into the abdominal cavity through the wound in the uterus.1 Ante-partum infanticide by abdomino-uterine puncture, or incision, inflicted by the woman herself, is of very rare occurrence; and it is for- tunate that the illegitimately impregnated subject does not know with what degree of safety to herself a fatal puncture may be inflicted upon her foetus when in the last weeks of gestation. The following case, fur- nished me by Prof. Barton Cooke Hirst, of the University of Pennsyl- vania, shows the measure of tolerance possible under such an injury. It occurred some eighteen months ago : “ A young girl, illegitimately impregnated for the first time, was delivered in the Maternity Hospital of a dead infant at term. The child was removed at once for burial and no cause noted for the still- birth. It was remarked that the girl had some pus issuing from her umbilicus after delivery; but she could or would give no explanation for it, and stated that it had been going on for some time. It gradually ceased, and the patient left the hospital in good condition. After her departure one of her intimates among the patients volunteered the in- formation to a nurse that about two weeks before delivery the girl had driven a long hat-pin through her navel to a great depth with the avowed intention of destroying her child. She had suffered great pain afterward, which, however, she concealed.” This was, no doubt, due to a local traumatic peritonitis. Ante-partum infanticide by abdomino-uterine incision under a self- infliction is a much more desperate procedure than that accomplished by a deep puncture as just described. A noted instance of this form of foeticide will be found in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences for February, 1888, page 156. In this case, dating March 28, 1886, a woman, living near Viterbo, Italy, single, and twenty-three years of age, made an incision of four and three-quarters inches in length in the middle of her right iliac region and through the uterine wall, killed the foetus by wounds in its chest and abdomen before ex- tracting it, and finished by cutting off its head. This woman recovered completely in forty-eight days, and was then under police restraint as an infanticide. The infant was proved by necroscopic examination to have never breathed. The woman had denied her pregnancy, and took these steps to prove the alleged falsity of the charges made against her. 1 Reported by Dr. George B. Ilaye, Plaquemines Parish, La. New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, October, 1879, p. 423.