Report on the English birthrate : Pt. I. England, north of the Humber.

  • Ethel M. Elderton
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report on the English birthrate : Pt. I. England, north of the Humber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    vomiting ; she felt listless and was so weak that she could hardly stand. On her admission the menses had not been re-established ; there was a marked blue line on the gums.... She recovered and in due course was delivered of a healthy child at term. [It would be desirable to follow up the later history of this child.] (ii) A married woman, aged 29, with four children, was admitted into the infirmary, July 18, 1911, suffering from severe pains in the abdomen and back. She was in a highly strung and nervous condition. Believing herself pregnant, she had taken black stick —a mixture of diachylon and aloes—in the form of pills sold to her by a chemist. She took six pills night and morning for the first week, and half that number for the second week. Severe abdominal pain developed and she miscarried on July 14th, about seventeen days after taking the first pills. . .. This woman was in a very weak state so that she could hardly stand. She recovered and left the infirmary a month later. She had taken 144 pills each of which contained 1 grain oleate and stearate of lead. To judge by Sir Thomas Oliver's cases, resulting abortion seems to be the rule, and in some instances, as in one reported by Professor Beattie, the woman becomes paralysed in the hands and legs, and complete recovery is doubtful. Seeing, writes Sir Thomas, that for twopence abortion can be procured, and that women in the guise of nurses are secretly preaching the advisability and encouraging the practise of it among the poorer working classes, also that in the full glare of daylight druggists are selling the material, surely the time has come, when we might well ask the question, how long the Government is going to allow this state of things to continue ? Disciples of Malthus would probably maintain that there is something to commend in the action, not the means by which the patient (Case (i)) in her twelfth pregnancy with ten children alive, the eldest only 18 years of age, and her husband earning 30s. a week, finding herself pregnant sought to relieve herself of a prospective burden by a remedy so easily obtained as diachylon. It would have been a greater and more disastrous calamity to the husband and the family had this woman died and left 10 children to be brought up, the eldest daughter being only 18 years of age. We feel strongly that while the case for or against preventives presents many discussable aspects, that against abortifacients can be absolutely established. Abortifacients, as matters stand, can be bought for a few pence and some druggists and many worse than druggists are selling the material in the most public manner. Sir Thomas Oliver urges in his paper that the sale of diachylon or lead pills should be made a criminal offence, an opinion with which we fully concur *. * The reader of these pages will have seen frequent remarks on this subject and it seems desirable in this note to emphasize them by reference to two papers of the last few years which throw light on the prevalence of diachylon abortifacients, and suggest the urgency for action. At the seventeenth International Congress of Medicine, 1913 (The Lancet, 1913, Vol. n. p. 492), Dr A. G. Hall of Sheffield read a paper on Diachylon as an Abortifacient. He referred to the steady growth of the practice. The use of diachylon to procure abortion appears to have originated in the Midlands in the nineties, but soon spread to Sheffield, where cases were recorded from 1901 to e. xix. 26