St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal (Volume 52)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: lire of the amniotic sac and prolonged labor. Menstruation had always been regular and painless. Coition had been practiced regularly and the woman never suspected that she was differently constructed from others until the examination of Dr. Payne disclosed the fact. Retention of Placenta after Abortion.?At the seance of Nov. 23rd, 1886, of the Academic de Medecine, this subject, so frequently discussed of late years, was treated by Dr. Budin. Two complications, said the doctor, may arise in these cases?hiemor- rhage and septicaemia. To avoid these, is intervention, manualor instrumental, either rational or necessary ? To admit that it is either the one or the other, we must demonstrate first, that retention of the placenta is really the source of frequent accidents; and secondly, that the interference, digital or instrumental, is not itself dangerous. To the first question Dr. Budin offers as answer, the statistics of 210 cases which occurred in his service at the Charite and Maternite. In this number of abortions there were 46 retentions, or say about 22 per cent. In the Charite there had not been a single case of hemorrhage and only two in the Maternite, both light, and both occurring at the moment of the delivery of the placenta. Of septic accidents there had been none. There . had been but one death, and that was a woman who was suffering with bronchitis and fever when admitted. She died of pneumonia 15 days after premature deliver)-. These figures demonstrate then, that out of 2l0 abortions there was not a single death from any causes imputable to the abortion. Nature had been allowed to take its course. He believed that digital and instrumental man- O3uvres, in addition to being useless, were absolutely harmful and were themselves the cause of grave haemorrhages, endometr..