A practical treatise on midwifery / by M. Chailly ... A work adopted by the Royal council of public instruction. Tr. from the French and ed. by Gunning S. Bedford.
- Chailly-Honoré, Nicolas Charles, 1805-1866.
- Date:
- 1847
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A practical treatise on midwifery / by M. Chailly ... A work adopted by the Royal council of public instruction. Tr. from the French and ed. by Gunning S. Bedford. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
86/562 page 64
![For a long time authors have endeavoured to discover the cause of this greater frequency in head presentations; it has been sup- posed that the law of gravity determined this arrangement, and that the foetus, being suspended by the umbilical cord, the cephalic extremity, more heavy than the other, was very naturally made to occupy the inferior part of the womb. M. P. Dubois, in a memoir read at the Academy of Medicine* in 1833, has, in my judgment, triumphantly refuted this opinion, and substituted for it another resting on numerous proofs, and which it is difficult not to admit. ]n a word, is it possible to believe that the foetus is suspended by the umbilical cord, when, as early as the third month, we know the cord is already longer than the longest diameter of the cavity in •which the ovum is contained ? Can we admit that it is the weight of the head which occasions it to present at the superior strait, when it is easy to satisfy ourselves that the weight of the head and pelvic extremity is the same ? To prove this fact, M. Dubois has repeatedly plunged, horizontally, into a quantity of water, a dead foetus, and he has uniformly observed that all the parts of the foetus descend with equal rapidity, and that the back is the first to reach the bottom of the base. He still farther adds, that in women who, during their pregnancy, retain the horizontal posture, the foetus as commonly presents the head ; that, before the full term, head pres- entations are less frequent, although, at this period, the head is really heavier than the pelvic extremity ; that in foetuses who have a tumour on the pelvic extremity, the tumour being even heavier than the head, this latter still presents ;f and that, finally, in ani- mals where the inferior portion of the organ does not correspond to the cervix, but to the fundus, head are more common than foot- ling presentations. Concluding, therefore, from all these facts, that the weight of the head has nothing to do with the production of this phenomenon, he has sought another explanation for the circumstance. Accord- ing to M. Dubois, an instinctive determination of the foetus itself presides over the accomplishment of this law, and this instinct is proved, during foetal life, by that regular and almost constant suc- cession of impressions and movements following them, which indi- cate that there is, during intra-uterine life, between these two func- tions the same connexion which is known to exist after birth. No attentive observer will deny this. And why should voluntary de- terminations be denied the foetus while contained in its mother's womb, when immediately after its expulsion these determinations become manifest 1 Who instructs it to seize the mother's breast, and extract nourishment from it ? and often, even in presentations of the face, who teaches it, before its birth, to suck the finger of the accoucheur ? Who indicates to the young of the opossum, when * Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Medicine, Paris, 1833, t. iii., p. 430, et t. iv., p. 475. t Since the publication of his Memoir, M. P. Dubois has reported a case of this nature; the child was born at the Maternite, and it had on its breech a large tumour; the head, how- ever, presented first, and very serious difficulty attended the extraction of the pelvic extrem- ity. A similar case also occurred at La Clinique.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21197878_0086.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
