Word: afterbirth
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Quantities of human blood are lost each year in childbirth. Much of it is blood which obstetricians leave in the placenta by clamping umbilical cords, doing so in the belief that they thereby make the afterbirth easy and complete. This practice "never had any scientific appeal" to Obstetrician James Robert Goodall of Montreal. "Why waste all this valuable material?" he asked. He and his assistants* experimented, found no harm done to mothers by draining placental blood immediately upon birth, found-as he announced in this month's Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics-that it can be stored indefinitely and that...
...improve, the muttering family repaired to a stone beneath the house which seemed to mark a grave, poured hot water on the stone. A European observer who witnessed this ceremony inquired its significance. The natives told him that the stone marked the place where the child's afterbirth had been buried in a rice pot a few months before, that the baby's continued illness was obviously due to the fact that ants were stinging the afterbirth, that the hot water would drive the ants away...
...with the complete opening of the womb's mouth, averages 12 hr. in first pregnancies, 4 hr. thereafter. Second stage ends with the baby's delivery, average, 4 to 6 hr. in first pregnancies, 1 to 4 hr. thereafter. Third stage ends with the expulsion of the afterbirth, should take only a few minutes...
...infants get their immunity from their mother's blood or milk. But there are arguments against that conception. A more tenable theory: the rapidly multiplying fetal and infant cells may establish a general protection called ''tissue immunity." If so, opined Drs. McKhann & Chu, the placenta (afterbirth) must contain substances which would prevent measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria and infantile paralysis in older children. With this idea they made some water extracts of after-births...