Lectures on ectopic pregnancy and pelvic haematocele / by Lawson Tait, F.R.C.S., Edin., & Eng., LL.D.

  • Lawson Tait
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on ectopic pregnancy and pelvic haematocele / by Lawson Tait, F.R.C.S., Edin., & Eng., LL.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by University of Bristol Library. The original may be consulted at University of Bristol Library.

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    in the ovary and that impregnation was affected there, brouglit about the notion at the end of last century and tlie beginning of this, that most ectopic pregnancies were ovarian. Hausman made a series of observations which were regarded as final and therefore the belief not only became imiversal but it infects our text books to this day, for authors of text-books copy one another with scrupulous fidelity and unblushing absence of acknowledgment. But if Hausman's observations on animals are carefully perused, and of course no writer of a text book would ever think of going to the original authority for information, it will be found that the observations on different animals give results so inconsistent with one another that it becomes absolute simplicity of intellect to attempt to apply them to the human being. Finally, Sir Everard Home published a paper in the Transactions of the Boyal Society (l)efore his audacious inventions M'^ere made manifest), and the belief in ovarian pregnancy became a creed, and it remained so till Velpeau raised the cry of unbelief. Even Campbell (1842) says that he believes cases of ovarian pregnancy are not so rare as his predecessors had asserted. Yet he quotes Velpeau as having examined four such cases, aided by two competent assessors, and as having easily determined that the ovary was not involved in three of them: but in the fourth they experienced not a little difficulty in determining the product of conception, ivhich did not exceed in size that of a flea, to be placed, not in the substance, but in the cyst between the peritoneal and projDcr tunic of the ovary. At another place (p. 29) he describes the occluded and distended tubes of a prostitute from one of which a white oval body the the size of a garden pea with some white viscid matter (doubtless an old pyosalpinx) was forced out by pressure, as an ovarian pregnancy. Again he quotes the dissection of a child aged thirteen, a confirmed masturbator, in whom was a dermoid cyst of the left ovary, as confirmation of his view. So credulous is Campbell that on a point like this his book is absolutely foolish. He has, however, discovered a number of descriptions which might be accepted as authentic but from their extreme antiquity (1G82, 1G97, 1735, and 17C7). Unfortunately the preparations of none of these cases can be traced, even the instance said to be visible in the museum at Wurzburg seems to have disappeared, and certainly in modern times there has not been exhibited any preparation which can bear the test of critical investigation. Of course it is impossible to admit any case as one of ovarian pregnancy in whicli no post-mortem examination had been made, indeed even when such an examination is made it would have to be at the hands of a competent observer only that an assertion of an ovarian pregnancy could be accepted. The uterus and both tubes would have to be recorded as intact and we should have one ovary present and the other not to be accounted for save by 2
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