OF TRUE PREGNANCY. 137 



that it is rarely so, and is not according to the natural order of 

 things. This, therefore, is also but a gratuitous hypothesis. The 

 same must be true of the passage discovered by M. Baudelocque, 

 Jun. in the side of the womb, as well as of the preternatural cavities 

 mentioned by Morgagni, Valsalva, &c. It is true we may have 

 recourse to anatomical varieties, to diseases, anomalies, to deviations 

 of all sorts, and indulge in a thousand suppositions; but the wisest 

 course is to confess, frankly, that the mechanism of interstitial preg- 

 nancy is wholly unknown. 



§. V. Causes of extra-uterine Pregnancy. 



354. The density, the preternatural thickness of the covering of 

 the ovule, or envelopes of the ovary, too strong an adhesion of the 

 germ, its being situated too deep or too near the ligament of the 

 ovary, the obliteration, paralysis, spasm, bad direction, excessive or 

 insufficient length, engorgement, or antiperistaltic motion of the 

 Fallopian tube, inflammation and ulceration of its mucous membrane, 

 induration of its trumpet end, or of one or more of its fringes, the 

 contraction of its external orifice, all the changes and anomalies that 

 this canal may exhibit, whether in regard to its conformation or its 

 situation, a laceration of the womb, spoken of by Boehffier, Bianchi, 

 and Weinckneicht, may well have produced some in?<;ances of extra- 

 uterine pregnancy; but it is certain, that in this I'espect science is 

 possessed of scarcely any thing beyond probabilities. Astruc believed 

 that unnmrried women were more liable to be sdected with this sort of 

 accident than others. Kruger, who unite? in this opinion, supposes 

 that the ovule remains in the ovary, stoj)s in the tube, or slips into the 

 peritoneum, because fear, alarm, i^xlignation, by attacking women 

 suddenly in the midst of the mo?i lively enjoyment, or shortly after- 

 wards, must occasion a distu-'Oance in the whole organism, whose 

 eflfecls reach even to the sexual organs. A case by M. Lallemand, 

 and another by Baudelocque, seemed to lend some support to the 

 opinion of Astruc; n\ fact, the extra-uteriiie conception in the two 

 women who wer^ the subjects of it, seem to have been efTected, 

 ■at the very instant of a violent fright, occasioned in one by the Ve- 

 membrance of some piece of forgetfulness, and in the other by a 

 sudden noise, which made her afraid of being caught in flagrante 

 delicto; but as nothing similar has been noticed in other cases, this 

 explanation can only be regarded as a tolerably plausible hypothesis. 

 355. Those who insist that fecundation is effected in the womb, 

 necessarily reject all these modes of viewing it, and can give no 

 account of extra-uterine pregnancy, but by. [supposing a retrograde 

 movement, by means of which the ovule reti)rr»s from the uterus into 

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