Still-Born Infants

Do not forget that when you sneeze, the fairies are endeavouring to carry you off, and that if a sudden lameness overtakes you, it indicates that you have been trespassing on fairy ground. The great safeguards against the fairies are fire, iron, and dung, the last-mentioned because the fairies, being pure spirits, cannot bear defilement. Never take fire out of a house with a person sick within its walls, or misfortune will surely attend you. Do not blame the fairies for all your ailments, for you may have been looked upon by someone possessing the evil eye. If you should meet anyone whom you know of a certainty to possess the evil eye, be sure to double your thumbs under your fingers, and if by any unfortunate chance he should praise anything or anyone belonging to you, never lose sight of him until, by whatever form of strategy you please, you have persuaded him to spit, so that you may annoint the object of his admiration with it, and so avert sickness or other misfortune. THE problem of the stillborn infant is one of primary importance to the practitioner, but as a general rule many possible causes of the condition are overlooked, and the practitioner is left wondering why a stillborn infant should have resulted from what had been an apparently normal labour. This is possibly due to the fact that many people do not properly appreciate the vast difference between death in an organism which is fully alive as a se.parate entity, as a child or adult, and death in an organism which has not yet reached the state of a separate existence,. as a foetus. The difference in the two types of death may be illustrated by the two methods of respiration employed before and after birth. After birth, respiration is a gaseous exchange between the atmospheric air in the lung alveoli and the blood as it circulates in the lung tissue. Before birth, respiration is a gaseous exchange between two liquids, the maternal blood and the feetal blood, as they circulate in the uterine sinusoids and in the placental villi. This remarkable difference in the method of respiration is of great importance in discussing how a foetus dies of intra-uterine suffocation. This obvious difference in the physiology of pre-natal and post-natal life must be remembered in examining a stillborn infant; and the difference in other physiological processes …