Word: eclampsia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Dr. Symeonidis, 39, had something special to get excited about. The National Cancer Institute announced that he had found a clue to the cause of eclampsia, a disease occurring in pregnancy that causes one-fifth of all maternal deaths in the U.S. Its victims have high blood pressure and damaged kidneys, often die in convulsions...
...discovery was one of the happy accidents that happen to sharp-eyed researchers. Dr. Symeonidis had fed 20 milligrams of progesterone, an ovarian hormone, to 25 pregnant rats. His purpose was to cause cancer; instead, the rats developed eclampsia. It was the first time the disease had been produced experimentally in animals. What Dr. Symeonidis had done was to throw the hormonal balance out of whack. Microscopic slides showed that the rats had suffered changes in liver, kidneys and placenta that human eclampsia patients suffer...
Much more research and many more carefully stained slides will be needed before doctors find a clue to the cure of eclampsia. But a clue to the cause is a big start. Eclampsia is such a mysterious ailment that it has baffled doctors for 4,000 years and has been nicknamed the "disease of theories...
...Paul de Kruif's book, The Fight for Life. In The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, Lorentz showed the effects of human waste and abuse on U. S. soil, forest and water resources. In The Fight for Life he shows the human waste caused by eclampsia, infection, hemorrhage-the three great killers of women in childbirth. Because childbirth kills oftenest where poverty is greatest, The Fight for Life was shot in a slum clinic, Chicago's famed Maternity Center. For delivery-room shots every piece of camera apparatus had to be sterilized with Lysol...
...soon ran through Vienna to the effect that it died because Dr. Weibel had paused for two minutes during the breakdown of the cinema camera. Bureaucrats in the Austrian Ministry of Education heard the talk. The State Secretary, Dr. Pernter, called Dr. Weibei to account. He explained that in eclampsia the child poisons the mother's blood and the mother's blood in turn poisons the child. In this case, said he, "autopsy next day showed conclusively that the child had died of toxemia received from the mother. There were so signs whatever of suffocation. Therefore the child...