Page:The American improved family physician, or home doctor.djvu/273

Rh 70 degrees will do very well; and if the patient is very sensitive or feeble, it may be taken in a warm room. Pregnant women usually bear cold water remarkably well.

4. The hip-bath should be frequently employed, especially near the period of delivery. For a month or two preceding the expected time it should be employed daily; this may not be so cold as to be particularly disagreeable, and live to ten minutes duration.

5. The patient must keep on her feet a good part of the time during the whole term. She may walk frequently in the open air, or do house-work, or exercise in any easy manner in the erect attitude. Nothing is more likely to induce a wrong position of the child in the womb, or a painful, lingering labor, than pressing and cramping the abdomen by sedentary habits. Females who are compelled to work with the needle, or sitting at a work-table, should be particularly careful at all times to maintain an upright posture. Adhesions of the afterbirth, flooding, tumors and inflammations of the parts are frequently owing to the compression produced by a mis-position of the body.

6. Excessive labor and violent exertions, also strong mental passions, or depressing emotions, are to be avoided as far as possible.

ACCIDENTS OF PREGNANCY.—Medical books give us a formidable catalogue of "diseases of pregnancy;" but I think, "says Dr. Trail," the phrase is another of those misnomers which are so plentiful in the books, and so well calculated to mislead. Diseases during pregnancy are common enough; but so far from being naturally of that condition, they are merely the evidences of the unnatural habits or circumstances of the individual.

The familiar fact that those diseases which rapidly exhaust the vitality of the body, as consumption, are suspended during pregnancy, to re-appear with all their formidable and fatal array of symptoms soon after the completion of the re-productive function, sufficiently attests the principle that nature is true to her own purposes, and that all diseases during pregnancy are fortuitous.

Abortion, which is the expulsion of foetus before the sixth month, and premature labor, its expulsion between the sixth month and maturity, are the most painful disorders or accidents attending pregnancy. The danger is usually in proportion to the hemorrhage. The common causes are general or local debility, "inward weakness," violent mental perturbation, and