256 CALDEBON. 



improbable tales concerning the hospitals circulate'! I by ignorant midwives 

 and meddlesome practitioners of the neighborhood, add not a little 

 to the fomenting of this spirit of aversion. For example, it is said 

 among a certain class of people that all the parturients who go to the 

 hospital are operated upon there, sometimes the abdomen being opened 

 to extract the child. It is also told that parturients are placed in 

 beds in proximity to those of dying patients and that they are compelled 

 to witness the sadness and horrors of death and also that at midnight 

 they hear the moans and laments of those seriously ill. These systematic 

 detractors of .hospital service also take pains to spread abroad a revised 

 and exaggerated account of the bad administration of hospitals, especially 

 with reference to alimentation and care. 



As a result of all this, months and months pass during which the 

 beds arranged for parturition in the hospitals are unoccupied by Filipino 

 women. This is not only injurious to the parturients and their new- 

 born infants, many of whom die without medical attendance, but is 

 detrimental also to the students in obstetrics who do not and can. not 

 have an opportunity for practical study, being thus limited to being 

 mere theorists in this branch of medicine so essentially practical and 

 experiential. 



However-, it has been possible to correct tins difficulty to a certain 

 extent, by the appointment of two externs -in obstetrics, charged with 

 gratuitously attending poor women in Manila during childbirth at 

 their homes, the students taking advantage of these opportunities for 

 their clinical instruction. Without such recourse, which we owe to the 

 initiative of the Philippine Medical School, students would finish their 

 entire course without any practical experience in obstetrics. The dif- 

 ference between the number of births witnessed by students in the 

 hospital and those which took place in private houses is instructive. In 

 St. Paul's Hospital the students saw only two births during the semester 

 from July 1 to December 31 of the year 1907, whereas during the 

 same period they attended 76 births in private houses, classified as 

 follows : 



Normal births 47 



Application of forceps 9 



Versions, shoulder presentation 



Placenta praevia 5 



Breech presentation . 4 



Postpartum haemorrhage 2 



Puerpal eclampsia 2 



Retention of the placenta 1 



Total 76 



Perineorrhaphia was performed in several instances. 

 The 76 births witnessed by students in the various districts of the city 

 is a much greater number than the two which they saw in St. Paul's 



