Word: womb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lowly cause of what is usually a lowly and unimportant disease, German measles (or rubella), long enjoyed the unsavory reputation of being the only virus clearly convicted of killing or crippling babies in the womb. But many other viruses are now emerging from researchers' culture tubes to qualify as enemies of the unborn...
When a baby is born with a certain type of heart murmur and is later found to have these valve and septal defects, something must have gone wrong in the womb. But what? And when? Infections may cause some of the valve defects, but not the majority, and not the hole in the wall. What makes the impoverished Negro family from Vian (pop. 930), near the Arkansas border, so interesting to doctors seeking clues to the true nature of the trouble is the fact that four of the offspring had essentially the same heart defects as their mother, although they...
...most such cases, doctors still do not know the precise cause of the trouble, and they resort to the smokescreen term "idiopathic* respiratory distress." The difficulty probably begins in the womb. At the end of a full-term pregnancy, a woman's hormone balance changes drastically to bring on labor. By a mechanism not yet understood in detail, these same changes, transmitted through the placenta, prepare the baby for the superhuman feat of changing from an aquatic parasite, drawing oxygen from its mother's blood, to an in dependent air breather. If pregnancy is too short, these hormone...
Incubator Emotions? Another puzzle under study at Stanford involves the workings of the brain of an infant ejected prematurely from the womb. Its electrical discharges are different from those of a full-term baby's brain, and to find out just how the preemie's brain waves change, Dr. Kretchmer's group has devised a special electroencephalograph connected to babies' heads...
...except in emergencies, up-to-date obstetrical surgeons usually make a curved cut across the lower part of the pelvis (technically, a laparotrachelotomy, or transverse cervical section) into a thinner part of the uterus. This carries far less risk of damage to the womb itself or to other organs -and, incidentally, leaves the woman free to wear a bikini afterward without embarrassment...