The bearings of chronic disease of the heart upon pregnancy, parturition, and childbed : with papers on puerperal pluero-pneumonia and eclampsia / by Angus MacDonald.

  • Macdonald, Angus, 1836-1886.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The bearings of chronic disease of the heart upon pregnancy, parturition, and childbed : with papers on puerperal pluero-pneumonia and eclampsia / by Angus MacDonald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    pregnancy and of parturition, more particularly of the latter, and at the same time give suggestions for the management of such complications, especially when they interfere with labour. This is all well and good, and as the regulations for their management are, on the whole, tolerably appropriate, I hope this single reference to the point will sufiEice, and that I shall not be expected to recur to it. But, so far as I know, there has been no attempt on the part of any English obstetrician or physician to differentiate the effects of the special cardiac lesions, and to define in any way their individual bearings upon either pregnancy or par- turition. Or, to put it otherwise, I know of no English writer who has striven to put obstetricians in a position to answer with intelligence the question that is every now and again asked of us by a patient who knows she has heart disease,— Should I marry.? or do I run great risk in marrying} Now, though I believe that under such circumstances ladies will almost invariably ask their doctor's advice and follow their own liking, yet we ought to be able to give sound counsel, so as to clear our own consciences of all blame in such an important decision. What is more, I think I shall be able to show in the sequel, that not only have physicians not written on this subject, but that a great amount of ignorance exists in the professional mind upon the matter,—ignorance that might and ought to have been greatly removed, if even a small share of attention had been bestowed upon the subject, and which is therefore much to be deprecated. I do not intend to refer in this work, except incidentally, to the disease known as ulcerative puerperal endocarditis. I mean to restrict myself specially to those instances of organic defect in the heart which have come into existence Inde- pendently of pregnancy, but which, as is well known may be seriously changed in the course of pregnancy, or during parturition or the lying-in period, or may so influence the