The jubilee of anaesthetic midwifery : an inaugural address to the Glasgow Gynaecological and Obstetrical Society, on Tuesday 19th January, 1897 / by A.R. Simpson.
- Simpson, Alexander Russell, Sir, 1835-1916.
- Date:
- 1897
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The jubilee of anaesthetic midwifery : an inaugural address to the Glasgow Gynaecological and Obstetrical Society, on Tuesday 19th January, 1897 / by A.R. 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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![4> Obstetrical Society, you may desire that I sliould still take it as the topic of my dissertation now. The First Anesthetic Labour. I proposed to your secretary to meet you to-day, because it was on a Tuesday, the 19t]i of January, fifty years ago, that J. Y. Simpson first made a woman in labour breathe the vapour of sulphuric ether and delivered her in her sleep. The case and its results were stated publicly on the following day •—first to his class in the University, and later in the evening to his brethren in the Obstetrical Society. In the February number of the Edinburgh Monthly Journal for Medical Science some details were published ; and in Notes on the Inhalation of Sulphuric Ether in the Practice of Midwifery, which appeared in the March number of that Journal, it is more fully recorded thus:— The first case in which I employed the ether vapour occurred on the 19th of January. The pelvis of the mother was greatly contracted in its conjugate diameter from the projection forwards and downwards of the promontory of the sacrum; the lumbar portion of the spine was distorted, and she walked very lamely. The present was her second con- finement. Her first labour had been long and difficult; she began to suffer on a Monday, and, after a protracted trial of the long forceps, was at last delivered by craniotomy late on the subsequent Thursday night. Even after the cranium had been fully broken down, a considerable time and much traction had been required to drag the diminished and mutilated head of the infant through the contracted brim of the pelvis, and she was long in recovering. Contrary to the urgent advice of her medical attendant, Mr. Figg, he was not made aware of her present or second pregnancy till she had arrived at nearly the end of the ninth month. It was thus too late to have recourse to the induction of premature labour, which had been strongly pressed upon her as the only means of saving her child, should she again fall in the family way. The pains of her second labour commenced in the forenoon of the 19th. I saw her with Mr. Figg at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and again at 7 o'clock. The os uteri was pretty well dilated, the liquor amnii not evacuated, the presenting head very high, mobile, and difficult to touch; and a pulsating loop of the umbilical cord was felt floating below it in the unruptured bag of membranes. From 5 to 9 o'clock the pains seeined only to push the circle](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2146795x_0006.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
