. A system of midwifery, including the diseases of pregnancy and the puerperal state. anical arrangements, by which alone canthe required muscular power be effectively applied to the bony pelvis is also an efficient support to the organs which are usuallycontained within it, and especially to those which are connected withthe function of generation. The obstetrician, however, looks at the pelvis from a different pointof view. In it he sees the osseous canal through which the productof conception must pass in the act of parturition. He sees in it alsothe protecting framework which sh
. A system of midwifery, including the diseases of pregnancy and the puerperal state. anical arrangements, by which alone canthe required muscular power be effectively applied to the bony pelvis is also an efficient support to the organs which are usuallycontained within it, and especially to those which are connected withthe function of generation. The obstetrician, however, looks at the pelvis from a different pointof view. In it he sees the osseous canal through which the productof conception must pass in the act of parturition. He sees in it alsothe protecting framework which shields the generative viscera fromthe effects of shock or injury. And, above all, he studies it as a structurewhich, if abnormal, may seriously obstruct the process of us look, then, for a moment, before quitting the subject, and fromthis standpoint, at the pelvis of the mammalia. Throughout the wholeseries, irrefragable evidence is afforded that the pelvis isdesigned witha direct reference to the propagation of the species; and we find more- 26 INTRODUCTORY, [ Fig. 1.—Pelvis of the female 2.—The same; showing the separation of thebones during parturition. over, that, on the approach of labor, certain modifications of structurewhich then occur clearly prove that nature prepares the parts before-hand for the new function. Thus, in the Chevrotains, a group of little deerlike animals, formerly as-sociated with the musk-deer,the ischia in the males join theelongated sacrum by ossifica- o ... tion of the sacro-sciatic liga-ments, but in the females thelatter retain their normal ex-tensile texture. In the prolificguinea-pig, again,1 the pelvis islong and laterally compressed,the passage being much nar-rower than the diameter of thehead of the mature three weeks before par-turition, the interpubic liga-ments become soft and extensile,sothatduring labor the innomi-nate bones separate from eachother at the symphysis, thesacro-iliac j
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectobstetrics, bookyear1
