The puerperal diseases : Clinical lectures delivered at Bellevue Hospital / By Fordyce Barker.

  • Barker, Fordyce, 1819-1891.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The puerperal diseases : Clinical lectures delivered at Bellevue Hospital / By Fordyce Barker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    The patient, a young and healthy primipara of nineteen, was devotedly attached to a gay husband, who did not at all deserve such love from any woman. During her labor, she was constantly reiterating her desire that her child should prove to be a boy, asserting that if it were not, she should wish to die, as her husband would neither love her or her child. At six in the morning, she was safely delivered of a fine girl. She at once demanded, with a fearful earnestness, to know the sex of the child. I jokingly replied that I could never tell the sex before they were fifteen or sixteen years old ; but, after I left the patient, the nurse boldly lied, and assured her that the child was a boy. Her condition was in every respect perfectly satisfactory, until the next evening, when her husband returned from a yachting trip, and, brutally expressing his disgust, informed her of the sex of the child. The nurse noticed, in a few moments, that she was very pale and breathing badly, and at once dis- covered that her bed was flooded with blood. I never have seen a patient recover from so fearful a hemor- rhage. For days her life literally seemed to hang upon a thread, and for several months she had the most bleached, pallid-looking countenance that I have ever seen in a living woman. Before I point out to you what you should do in such cases as these, you will indulge me in a slight di gression, for some general remarks which will have a bearing on many of the subjects which I shall have the honor to discuss with you. In no department of medi- cal practice, not even in surgery, is there so great a liability to the occurrence of sudden emergencies where success of treatment depends wholly upon the prompt- ness and efficiency with which the resources of our art are applied. And in some of the most rapidly dangerous