Graphic illustrations of abortion and the diseases of menstruation / Consisting of Twelve Plates from Drawings Engraved on Stone, and Coloured by Mr. J. Perry, and Two Copper-plates from the Philosophical Transactions, Coloured by the Same Artist. the Whole Representing Forty-five Specimens of Aborted Ova and Adventitious Productions of the Uterus, With Preliminary Observations, Explanations of the Figures and Remarks, Anatomical and Physiological.

by A. B. Granville

Fig. 22. Ovum cum involucris internis, ab amnionitide et chorionitide, condensatis.

(Gestation, near upon five months?)

Here we have a specimen which will embarrass not a little those writers in obstetrics who, either through respect for olden authorities, or from habit, keep repeating what has been said before them, respecting the structure of the human ovum. I will describe the ovum as it stands before me this day, the 21st of January, 1833, on which occasion I again compared it with the drawing made some years before, and found the latter most strikingly correct in all its parts.

Beginning externally, we find a thin pellicle, many fragments of which are seen floating, covering the whole of the placenta, which seems consolidated and to have been compressed. These parts are not visible in the figure here represented, as they are placed at the posterior portion of the specimen. From each side of, and at the edge of the placental cake, comes a loosely-webbed, semi-transparent, coarse membrane, in some parts porous, in other parts opaque, which proceeds from under the placenta, and must have embraced the entire ovum before it was laid open. This membrane resembles that called the caducous,—and is in fact the membrane marked as such in all the preparations of human Ova in most obstetrical collections. Within this membrane we find another, considerably thickened, which, judging from the several portions that remain yet transparent, is actually passing from the latter into the opaque state: it is bifoliated. Immediately within the last-described envelope, and at the inferior part of the Ovum, we observe a thick cake, which was probably extravasated blood: it extends upwards on the right of the observer, getting less thick as it proceeds. The cake itself, on the side next to the fœtus, is lined, but loosely, by another bifoliated transparent involucrum, held fast to the involucrum just described by filiform vessels, which in some parts are distinctly visible even to the length of half an inch, with a space of the same dimension between the membrane and the cake before mentioned. The inside lining of the whole is the amnion, from the upper and lateral portion of which hangs an umbilical cord of three quarters of an inch in length, with an imperfect fœtus the size of half a wasp, in which however the rudiments of the abdominal extremities are quite distinct. The whole Ovum measures four inches vertically, and three inches transversally.