Handbook of obstetric nursing / by Francis W.N. Haultain and J. Haig Ferguson.

Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of obstetric nursing / by Francis W.N. Haultain and J. Haig Ferguson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    practice of midwifery in the present century. It is the most successful practical achievement of modern medi- cine, and the results of its adoption have been most remarkable. Every one is familiar with the ravages childbed fever used to make in our maternity hospitals, and every medical man knows that a mortality of 15 to 20 per cent, was by no means uncommon. Epidemics of childbed fever in Germany, France, London, and Dublin, are facts with which the most superficial student of obstetrics is well acquainted. But it is well known that antiseptics have entirely and absolutely revolution- ised all this, and this explains the recent history of such hospitals as Paris, Prague, Copenhagen, London, and Edinburgh, where, as a matter of fact, the disease has been practically stamped out. There is no more strik- ing practical fact in the whole history of medicine, than that in the hospitals just mentioned, without any external or internal change in the hospitals, except the introduction of antiseptics, the mortality from childbed fever should have fallen from 15 per cent, to almost none at all. Antiseptics, therefore, have almost entirely annihilated puerperal fever. What are the causes then of childbed fever, and how is it to be warded off ? As stated above, it is blood poisoning, or septicaemia, and it is caused by the entrance, through a wound, of some poisonous material into the blood. In the simplest and most natural labours, several wounds are never wanting. There are generally some slight tears of the external parts, there is