Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/644

 Wherefore women are most prone to conceive either just before or just subsequent to the menstrual flux, for at these periods there is a greater degree of heat and moisture, two conditions necessary to generation. In the same manner when other animals are in heat, the genital organs are moist and turgid.

Such is the state of the uterus as I have found it before birth. In pregnant women, as I have before stated, the uterus increases in proportion to the fœtus, and attains a great size. Immediately after birth, I have seen it as large as a man's head, more than a thumb's breadth in thickness, and loaded with vessels full of blood. It is, indeed, most wonderful, and, as Fabricius remarks, quite beyond human reason, how such a mass can diminish to so vast an extent in the space of fifteen or twenty days. It happens as follows: immediately on the expulsion of the fœtus and its membranes, the uterus gradually contracts, narrows its neck, and shrinks inwardly into itself; partly by a process of diaphoresis, partly by means of the lochia, its bulk insensibly lessens; and the neighbouring parts, bones, abdomen, and all the hypogastric region, at the same time diminish and recover their firmness. The lochial discharge at first resembles pure blood; it then becomes of a sanious character, like the washings of flesh, and is otherwise pale and serous. At this last stage, when no longer tinged with blood, the women call it "the coming of the milk," for the reason probably that at that time the breasts are loaded with milk, and the lochia sensibly diminish; as if the nutritive matter was then transferred to the breasts from the uterus.

In other animals the process is shorter and simpler; in them the parts concerned recover their ordinary bulk and consistence in one or two days. In fact, some, as the hare and rabbit, admit the buck, and again become fecundated, an hour after kindling. In like manner, I have stated that the hen admits the cock immediately on laying. Women, as they alone have a menstruous, so have they alone a lochial discharge; added to which they are exposed to disorders and perils immediately after birth, either from the uterus, through feebleness, contracting too soon, or from the lochia becoming vitiated or suppressed. For it often happens, especially in delicate women, that foul and putrid lochia set up fevers and other violent