Obstetric operations : including the treatment of hmorrhage / by Robert Barnes ; with additions, by Benjamin F. Dawson.

  • Robert Barnes
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Obstetric operations : including the treatment of hmorrhage / by Robert Barnes ; with additions, by Benjamin F. Dawson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    plied ill two cases. It held admirably; but all its holding power is due to the pressure exerted by the mother's parts upon the blades. Mattel, of Paris, has made another instrument, whose blades do not cross, whose shanks, parallel, are set in a cross- bar of wood to serve for traction ; and quite recently Dr. Inglis has proposed a forceps in which the handles are done away with altogether, there being nothing but a short curve of the shank, representing the shoulders on the handles of Simpson's forceps, to serve for traction. I think this sacri- fice of all compressive and leverage power, reducing the instrument to a weak tractor, is a retrograde movement. But it proves the proposition that the hold upon the child's head is the result of the adaptation of the curved blades and the outward wedge-pressure of the mother's parts upon the bows of the blades. ]^ow, the strength of the hold depends mainly upon the degree of curvature of the blades and the width of the fenestrge. If the curve is one of large radius, so that the two blades, when in opposition, approach parallelism, and especially if the fenestrse be nar- row, the hold will be feeble, and moderate traction will cause the forceps to slip, and this in spite of any compres- sion you can exert upon short handles. But increase the curves so that the blades in opposition form nearly a circle, and the instrument will not slip. This increased head-curve is one feature of the French or Continental forceps. The hold is further strengthened by making the points approach nearer together. In the English patterns the points are generally distant from each other an inch or more. In the foreign forceps the distance is often much less than an inch. There is some danger, from this proximity, of pinching or abrading the skin of the face. So much for the grip, and traction. Let us now study the compressive power. This is in- considerable in almost all the English forceps, but is an im- portant feature in most of the foreign long forceps. The essential condition for compression is, indeed, present in