A treatise on the diseases and special hygiène of females / By Colombat de l'Isère. Translated from the French, with additions, by Charles D. Meigs.
- Marc Colombat de L'Isère
- Date:
- 1850
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on the diseases and special hygiène of females / By Colombat de l'Isère. Translated from the French, with additions, by Charles D. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
35/764 (page 29)
![sufficiently established a hyperaemic status of the interna] genitals, to account for the entire local plethora or uterine hyperaemia, -whose result is the men- strual discharge. Here, at last, we see established the doctrine of a local plethora as a cause of menstruation, and that plethora resting on a sure phy- siological basis—the regular periodical development, to wit, of the Graafian vesicle with its contents. The question as to why it should have so exact a periodical character, is no more difficult of solution than that of the stated periods of eruption of the first and second dentition, the growth and fall of the hair or the beard, &c., or the periodical affections of the sphincters under a regularly operating law in physiology. In adopting the views of the waiters whose names have been so repeatedly mentioned, I find abundant explanations of the poverty of our resources in the use of the mere menagoga, and in the efficacy of the treatment of menstrual disorders by a regard fixed upon the constitution, whose disorders are fully sufficient to impair the ovarian travail, by suspending the development of the vesicles, under disease of other organs, or of the reproductive system itself, or by precipitating and rendering dangerous an irritamentum whose gentle and normal influences ought to produce no pain nor be attended by the least interruption. Dr. M. A. Raciborski, of Paris, has put forth, in the present year, 1844, a small volume already mentioned, upon the subject of menstruation, of the very highest interest. It is entitled Be la Puberte et de VAge Critique chez la Femme, au point de Vue Physiologique, Hygienique et Medicate, et de la Ponte Periodique chez la Femme et les Mammiferes. M. R. shows that the development of the Graafian vesicle ought to be considered not merely as the cause of menstruation, but as menstruation itself; and that a -woman may regularly develop her ova and be liable to conceive even when she may have never had the outward and visible signs of the catamenia. After having related certain cases of very late occurrence of the catamenia, he says, at p. 89; These facts seem only to confirm what we shall, in a subsequent page, fully establish, to wit, that the menstrual haemorrhage is but a secondary phenome- non in menstruation, properly so called, and that the capital phenomenon in this function consists in the maturation and the periodical discharge of the ova or the 'ponte' (laying.) There are women in whom it is confined to this act alone, and we have the records of cases in which women have given birth to several children without having ever seen the menses. Such is the short statement I have thought proper to add to M. Colombat's views of the causes of menstruation. But I should gladly refer the reader to Xegrier, to Gendrin, to Robert Lee and Raciborski.—M.] The immortal Bichat, in his Anatom. Gen., says that the blood that flows in a menstruation is of the same nature with that which escapes in any other active haemorrhage. It proceeds principally](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21029313_0035.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
