ON FLOODING AND INVERSION OF THE UTERUS. 323 
medical science. I will endeavour to make myself as intelligible 
as possible, by avoiding all the technicalities which are ordinarily 
used by medical men. 
Between two and three months ago I attended a woman in her 
confinement, and labour proceeded to a natural termination. The 
after-birth came away without any trouble or untoward symptom, 
and I was preparing to leave the house, when the nurse called me 
to my patient, stating that she was in a fainting fit. I went to 
the bed-side, found her extremely exhausted, and, suspecting flood- 
ing to have occurred, proceeded to satisfy myself on this head. 
Blood was flowing away at a fearful rate, when I introduced my 
hand with the view of immediately arresting it. My hand came 
in contact with a tumour, which was at once recognized to be the 
inverted womb. In fact, the womb was turned inside out. After 
a time, by compressing the tumour, and exerting some degree of 
pressure upwards, it was reduced, and my patient did very well. 
In consequence of the rarity of this accident, and of the discre- 
pancy in most of the standard works on midwifery with regard 
to the cause of inversion of the womb, the accompanying flood- 
ing, and the precise mode of effecting the reduction, I was induced 
to publish the case, with a few observations, in the London Medical 
Gazette*. 
Most of the systematic writers on midwifery state that inversion 
of the womb is caused by imprudently pulling at the navel-string, 
in order to bring away the after-birth, and deny its spontaneous 
occurrence. Now, the case which came under my notice was 
clearly one in which the inversion came on spontaneously, inas- 
much as there was no inversion at the time the after-birth came 
away ; and it was not until nearly half an hour had elapsed after 
its expulsion that pain and flooding indicated any preternatural 
occurrence. 
In a conversation a few days ago with Mr. Thomas Partridge, 
a highly respectable farmer, of Leegrave, in this county, I found 
that the turning inside out of the womb occasionally, though rarely, 
happens to the cow and sheep ; and he related the particulars of an 
interesting case which occurred to a sheep on his farm some years 
ago, in which the womb was turned inside out, after the natural 
expulsion of the lamb and membranes. He reduced the tumour ; 
but no sooner was it returned than strong bearing-down efforts im- 
mediately caused the entire mass again to protrude. This was re- 
duced, and again protruded for three or four successive times, when 
he determined upon attempting to prevent its protrusion by sewing 
together the edges of the orifice of the vagina, or external passage ; 
* See Nos. for April 5 and 12. 
