On the causes and treatment of abortion and sterility; being the result of an extended practical inquiry into the physiological and morbid conditions of the uterus, with reference especially to leucorrhoeal affections and the diseases of menstruation / [James Whitehead].

  • Whitehead, James, 1812-1885.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the causes and treatment of abortion and sterility; being the result of an extended practical inquiry into the physiological and morbid conditions of the uterus, with reference especially to leucorrhoeal affections and the diseases of menstruation / [James Whitehead]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    if not greater in degree than that of puberty: it has always, indeed, been regarded as a period fraught with peculiar diffi¬ culty and danger. In the majority, the last menstrual change is accomplished with more or less inconvenience; in some with severe and prolonged suffering; and a fatal issue is by no means infrequent. All comprehended in the preceding table were considered to have completely surmounted the change at the time of the report; although one died a few months afterwards of uterine disease, the origin of which was clearly traceable to functional derangement, first manifesting itself at the time when the patient ceased finally to men¬ struate. Of the sixty-nine individuals of whose history an abstract is now given, twenty-three, or about thirty-three per cent, encountered difficulties in immediate connection with the changes then taking place, of such nature as to require active remedial assistance. But even those denominated “ favourable,” among the preceding cases, were not all equally free from disease at the period in question. Several suffered, in greater or less degree, under an affection presently to be noticed, which, although of extremely common occurrence, and attended frequently with considerable constitutional disturbance, rarely excites the serious attention of either patient or practitioner; and it is, perhaps, more than all, on account of its frequency, and partly also from a feeling of delicacy on the part of the patient, that it is so seldom brought under treatment. The forms of uterine disease commonly met with at the period of the last change of life, may, for practical conve¬ nience, be arranged under three heads, each distinguishable from the other by the character of the discharge with which, early or late, it is almost invariably accompanied; and also, by the kind and degree of suffering which it occasions in the organ immediately implicated, and the sympathetic disturb¬ ances simultaneously awakened in remote parts of the body.