Memoir on the sex of the child as a cause of difficulty and danger in human parturition / by J.Y. Simpson.

  • Simpson, James Young, 1811-1870.
Date:
[1844]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoir on the sex of the child as a cause of difficulty and danger in human parturition / by J.Y. Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    51/62 (page 45)
    but they may be evoked with all the force of a mathematical de¬ monstration, when we prosecute our calculations for them among large and accumulated masses of observations. From any study, however minute and accurate, of a limited number of cases of la¬ bour, no man would probably feel himself entitled to conclude that male are in any notable degree more difficult and dangerous than female births; but this, as we have seen, becomes a demonstrable and strongly marked fact, when we direct our inquiries after the truth of it into the records of hundreds or thousands of carefully reported observations, such as we have made use of in the course of the preceding inquiry. The remarks we have hitherto made upon the male sex of the child as a cause of delay, difficulty, and danger during labour, have referred principally to the larger size of the male infant’s head or cranium. In that condition, and its effects, we have so far found a satisfactory explanation of the numerous complica¬ tions and casualties to which the mother herself is subjected in male births. One or two additional observations may be required to show more specifically in what manner the safety and life of the male child during labour, and for some time after it, is endanger¬ ed by the same circumstance. We believe that the larger size of the contents of the male, than of the female cranium, or, in other words, the larger size of the male brain or encephalon at birth, and the consequent greater compression and injury to which it is sub¬ jected during birth, affords us the proper clue to the explanation of these peculiarities in the male infantile mortality. The weight, and hence the size of the brain, is now well ascer¬ tained to be absolutely more in the adult male than in the adult female. From measurements of the interior of numerous crania,* Sir William Hamilton computes the male adult encephalon as weighing 3 lbs. 8 oz., Troy, and that of the adult female as 3 lbs. 4 oz. Professor Reid carefully weighed in the Edinburgh Infirmary the encephalon of 53 adult males and 34 adult females. The average weight of the male brain in these observations was 3 lbs. 2 oz. 3\ drachms; that of the female, 2 lbs. 12 oz. 8J drachms; and the average difference in favour of the male encephalon thus amounted to 5 oz. 11 drachms.f This difference in weight between the encephalic contents in the two sexes exists also at birth. In an elaborate paper on the weights of the brain in the different sexes, &c., founded on numerous observations, and published by Professor Tiedemann in the London Philosophical Transactions for 1836, that distinguished anatomist states, (p. 502,) “the female brain weighs on an average 8 ounces less than * Monro’s Anatomy of the Brain, 183], p. 12. f London and Edinburgh Monthly Journal for 1843, p. 322. See also Dr Sim’s paper in the London Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, vol. xix., for similar results.