Page:Manual of Antenatal Pathology and Hygiene.djvu/25

 EMERGENCE OF ANTENATAL PATHOLOGY 3 Pathology, from the transmission of syphiHs and the causation of malformations, to the predisposition to tuberculosis and the inherited tendency to insanity. It need hardly be said that the effect upon the public mind has not always been for good. Disaster stares the mariner in the face who sets out without rudder or compass. The medical profession must in this matter provide the general public with a rudder, perchance it may yet be able to supply also the compass.

Emergence of Antenatal Pathology.

It is clear, then, that Antenatal Pathology has a novelty, which consists not so much in the facts with which it has to deal, as in the way in which they are approached, and in the standpoint from which they are surveyed. It sets forth a new manner of looking at old facts. The new manner is the scientific ; and it has been rendered possible by the marked advances that have taken place in the other departments of medicine and biology. As has been aptly said by Professor A. E. Simpson : " Antenatal Pathology is one of the last provinces of medicine to have emerged from a kind of mediaeval wonderland into the realm of science." This is particularly true of a large and very characteristic subdivision of the subject, which has been named Teratology, dealing, as it does, with monstrosities {terata) and their mode of origin. It may be doubted whether Teratology has yet emerged from its "mediaeval wonder- land." The general public, it must at once be admitted, looks upon monstrosities to-day very much in the same way as did the general public and the profession as well in the Middle Ages ; but it is a trifle more tolerant of the progenitors of such prodigies. In this respect, however, the general public is not to be too severely censured, for it is unfortunately true that many medical men, when they meet with specimens of antenatal malformation, describe them in a fashion that they would certainly never employ if the case were one of nervous disease or tumour, using a terminology which might with reason be called mediaeval. A monstrous foetus may, it is true, resemble, although the likeness is often far to seek, a dog or a cat or an ape ; but in describing no other patho- logical specimen would it be considered as sufficient or satisfactory to rest content with such a comparison. Yet in many reported cases of monstrosity the morbid anatomy is dismissed with a brief refer- ence to a dog-like or frog-like look, while many lines of print are devoted to the story of an alleged maternal impression during the pregnancy of which the malformed infant was the product. If this be so in the profession, what reason, then, is there for wonder if in the public mind a veil of mystery shroud the birth of a monstrous fcetus ?

Literature of. Antenatal Pathology.

It has to be borne in mind that Antenatal Pathology has not emerged directly out of the ignorance of the Middle and Dark Ages ; it has not sprung full of life immediately out of dead superstitions