582 MANAGEMENT OF LYING-IN WOMEN. 



ing the subsequent confinement. It is important that she should 

 neither speak nor be spoken to, except when necessary. A calm 

 state of the mind and repose of the body are so indispensable, that 

 too much care cannot be taken to remove every cause that might 

 interfere with them. The value of this precept was so well under- 

 stood in ancient Rome, that the magistrates themselves had no right 

 to enter the house of a lying-in woman for the execution of any 

 sentence or decision whatever; and in order to secure the respect 

 of the citizens for her asylum, it was sufficient, says Juvenal, to sus- 

 pend a wreath at her door. 



Foribus suspende coronas, 

 Jam pater es. 



Most of the diseases which affect a woman in child-bed may be 

 attributed to the thousands of visits of friends, neighbors, or acquain- 

 tances, or the ceremony with which she is too often oppressed: she 

 wishes to keep up the conversation, her mind becomes excited, the 

 fruit of which is headache and agitation; the slightest indiscreet 

 word worries her; the slightest motives of joy agitate her in the ex- 

 treme; the least opposition instantly makes her uneasy, and I can 

 affirm that among the numerous cases of peritonitis met with at the 

 Hospital de Perfectionnement, there are very few whose origin is 

 unconnected with some moral commotion. 



1240. After the delivery of the placenta, and putting to bed, the 

 woman is commonly seized with a rigor, which sometimes goes so 

 far as to occasion a rattling of the teeth together. Some physi- 

 cians and the public have on this account deemed it best to cover 

 her over with a weight of bed-clothes; but this rigor, which is suffi- 

 ciently accounted for by the changes that have just occurred in her 

 system, and which must not be confounded with the chill of perito- 

 nitis, lasts but a few minutes, and scarcely deserves any particular 

 attention. 



It would, doubtless, be imprudent to cover the lying-in woman too 

 lighdy; but it would be equally dangerous to fall into the opposite 

 excess. By covering her with thick bed-clothes and surrounding 

 her with well closed bed-curtains, and, in fine, by keeping her too 

 warm, besides the headaches, floodings, and convulsions to wiiich 

 she would be exposed, we rarely fail to produce a more or less abun- 

 dant perspiration, which it is sometimes difficult to suppress; this 

 diaphoresis probably has a great deal to do in producing the miliary 

 fever, which is so uncommon at the present day, and which was 

 formerly so often met with in lying-in women. 



