A manual of medical jurisprudence / by Alfred Swaine Taylor.

  • Taylor, Alfred Swaine, 1806-1880.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of medical jurisprudence / by Alfred Swaine Taylor. 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.

    667/872 (page 655)
    the intermenstrual period, this would make the gestation 309 days; or, assuming that impregnation did not occur until twenty-eight days from the date of the last menstruation, this would make the period 295 days, or forty-two weeks and one day. A case is reported by Power (' Human Pregnancy'), in which gestation is said to have extended to 325 days. Chattaway communi- cated to the author the following instance of protracted gestation. A healthy woman, set. 36, applied to him to attend her in her confine- ment, which she expected to take place in Sept. 1856. The menses appeared for the last time in Dec. 1855, and she quickened in the beginning of April, 1856. About the middle of Sept. {i.e. on the 283rd day, dating from the last menstruation), Chattaway was summoned to attend her, and he found her labouring under severe false pains; there was also a discharge of mucus tinged with blood. The case went on imtil Nov. 19th, 1856, when the patient was delivered of a female child of the average size. It would thus appear, according to the ordinary mode of calculation, that, deducting twenty-eight days from the last appearance of the menses, gestation was protracted in this instance to 330 days, or forty-seven weeks and one day. This, of course, is open to the suggestion that the menses had ceased from some accidental cause, and that pregnancy had taken place some weeks sub- sequently. It is known, in fact, that a woman may, exceptionally, menstruate even more than once after conception. In reference to this objection, it may be observed that few women have such un- usually protracted pregnancies. Then, again, all practitioners may not have met with protracted cases; but the fact being clearly ascer- tained in one case, it is unnecessary to search for more, unless we doubt the credibility of reporters well qualified to observe, and who could have had no conceivable motive to misrepresent the facts which came before them. The advocates of a fixed and limitable period differ from each other by a space of at least ten or twelve days, and each must either take his own experience for the final decision of this question, or must allow that men of equal powers of observation with themselves have met with exceptional instances. Protracted cases of gestation are always open to the objection that the menstrual function may have been suspended from some hidden morbid cause, one or two months before the actual date of conception, and that there may have been some error in the calculation by which the period has been determined. If, however, the objection is admitted under these circumstances, it would be only equally just to admit that in any given case the ordinary and so-called fixed period, also calculated from the cessation of menstruation, is based on a fallacy. The menstrual function may have accidentally ceased, or continued for several intervals after conception, and thus a corresponding change should be made in fixing the ordinar}^ period of gestation. This view of the question implies that no reliance can be placed on the date of the cessation of the menses as evidence of the actual duration of pregnancy, whether natural, premature, or protracted. But Hicks met with a case in which the pregnancy of a woman appeared to be