An Account of some of the most important diseases peculiar to women / by Robert Gooch.

  • Gooch, Robert, 1784-1830.
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An Account of some of the most important diseases peculiar to women / by Robert Gooch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    that they were diseases which were never fatal. Whilst I was attending the near relation of one of the most eminent and experienced of the provin- cial practitioners of this island, a letter arrived from him, begging the family to have no fears, that he had seen many such cases daring his long life, and never saw one die ; and even the late Dr; Bail- lie, when consulted about a case, remarked, that the question was not whether she was to get well, but when she was to get well. The latter patient deid within a week after this prognosis. There can be no doubt that a very large propor- tion of cases ofdisord red mind in lying-in wo- men and nurses ultimately recover, but it is equally certain that some of them die, and there are two modes of calculating the probability of death in any individual case: the one is to ascertain the proportion of deaths to recoveries in as large a number of cases as possible; the other is to en- deavour to discover some symptoms, the absence or presence of which indicates safety or danger. As to the former of these modes, it is very diffi- cult to procure trust-worthy information. JVL Esquirol, of Paris, has given an acount of ninety- two patients in the Saltpetriere who had become deranged whilst lying-in or nursing. Of these six died, that is, one in fifteen; but this estimate must give the mortality in chronic cases rather than recent ones. Dr. Burrows has published a table of fifty-seven cases, of which ten died; this is a mortality of more than one in six. The best mode of forming an estimate of the mortality of