On the duration of labour as a cause of mortality and danger to the mother and infant; &c : in reply to a letter of Dr. Collins / by J.Y. Simpson.
- James Young Simpson
- Date:
- 1848
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the duration of labour as a cause of mortality and danger to the mother and infant; &c : in reply to a letter of Dr. Collins / by J.Y. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![ternity Charity. Yet out of 35,743 deliveries among tlie patients of that Institution, only 166 mothers died, or 1 in every 215. And please to recollect too, that the practitioners at the London Maternity Charity, who were thus, without any selection, so much more successful in practice than the Master of the Dublin Hospital with his selections, and to whom, therefore, I fear you must surrender that laurel of which you suppose yourself the wearer:— please, I say, to recollect, that they are (shall I write it?) female practitioners—real petticoated midwives. When adducing the supposed success of your own prac- tice, I am not aware that you have anywhere stated that your general success during your seven years' Mastership, as far as regards the maternal mortality alone, was con- siderably less than that of other Masters who had j^reced- ed you in the same institution, as Dr Rock and Dr Every. But the accoucheur, in every case of labour, has charge of two lives,—the life of the mother and the life of the infant. In your 16,414 cases you had committed to you, for in- stance, 33,068 lives, including ] 6,414 mothers, and 16,654 infants. Out of these 33,068 lives, 1 in every 27 was lost, —a mortality greater, I believe, than that which has happened to almost any of the other Masters who have had charge of the Dublin Hospital. You choose to blame and criticise me for losing, in my private practice, (du- ring a late epidemic of puerperal fever), and when using ansesthetics, two mothers from puerperal fever, out of 150 deliveries. Out of 150 children born in these 150 cases, only one was dead. Of the 300 lives thus entrusted to me, I lost only one in 100. You lost 1 in 27. The statistical investigations of Merriman and Casper have proved, that in England, and upon the continent, the number of maternal deatlis following deliver}^ has de- creased during the last century from about one in 50 or 80, to one in 150 or 180, from the science and art of](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21474886_0018.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
