Obstetrics for nurses / by Joseph B. De Lee.

  • Joseph DeLee
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Obstetrics for nurses / by Joseph B. De Lee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    38/708 page 34
    flattened, pear-shaped body, 2\ inches long, 1J inches wide, J inch thick, and weighs from 2 to 2\ ounces. It is a firm organ, but when pregnant it grows very soft and increases enormously in size and capacity. It has two parts—the fundus and the cervix. The cavity of the uterus is usually closed by apposition of the walls; it is long, narrow, and flattened. The cervix has a little round opening called the os, through which the uterine secretions, the menstrual blood, during labor the ovum, and during the puerperium the lochial discharges, pass. In virgins it is a round open¬ ing; in women who have had children, a transverse slit. The uterus is attached at the middle of the cervix to the vagina, a sheath 4 inches long, terminating at an opening in the skin called the vulva. The vagina is a very elastic tube and lies between the bladder and the rectum. In ordinary conditions it will admit one or two fingers, but during labor it stretches to 4 or 5 inches in diameter. The uterus has, leading outward from its upper corners, two tubes—the fallopian tubes. These are about the size of a crow’s quill, are tortuous, growing larger as they leave the uterus, to terminate in trumpet-shaped ends fringed with delicate streamers called fimbriae. The canal of the tube likewise grows larger after it leaves the uterus. Thus there is a free passage through the vulva, the vagina, the os, the cervix, the uterine body, and the tubes to the fimbriated ends opening out into the peritoneal cavity. The organs just named are composed of walls more or less thick, made up of muscle and connective tissue, lined throughout with mucous membrane, and covered by per¬ itoneum for part of the distance. The mucous membrane varies in quality in different portions of the canal, according to the function required of the part: at the vulva it is delicate and very sensitive; in the vagina, rough and strong; in the cervix and uterus, very vascular and velvety. In the uterus and tubes the epithelium is covered with a micro¬ scopic down which has the function of automatic waving
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