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

This is a highly interesting case of Mola, to which I have given the designating appellative of Mytilus from its suggesting, when laid open longitudinally, the idea of that shell (muscle).

It is an oblong mass, broader at one end than at the other, as all these productions of the uterine cavity are found to be. In its external appearance it is fleshy, pulpy, of variegated tints even at the very moment of its expulsion, irregularly smooth, and free from any pellicle or membranaceous covering.

Internally it exhibits an oblong cavity, corresponding in figure, relative breadths, and length to the containing mass, which looks like a thick coagulum at the sectional edges. This cavity, however, is not a mere hollow in the general mass, but looks like an oblong membranous pouch imbedded in that mass. Its interior is lined by an exquisitely delicate and almost fumiform pellicle—lactescent or opalescent. The pointed extremity of this cavity loses itself in the brilliantly red mass of the tapering end of the mole, at neither of whose extremities is there the least semblance of any aperture.

When I laid open this curious mole, its cavity contained a small quantity of clear fluid.

REMARKS.

I have for a great many years past been in the habit of arranging into three distinct groups all those adventitious productions, or excretions of the uterine cavity, connected either with irregular menstruation or faulty conception, which authors have described under so many different names. I consider that all such productions are either the result of an organizing effort on the part of the uterus during painful menstruation, or a successive arrangement of coagula of blood pending a profuse or critical menstruation; or lastly a blighted ovum, passed as an originally-imperfect seed into the womb from the ovarium, or which has become imperfect subsequently to its reception within that organ.

To the first of these groups I have given the name of Dysmenorrhoic organizations.

To the second the name of Polymenorrhoic stratifications.

To the third the name of Pseudo-Ova, or Molæ, including what are vulgarly called False Conceptions.

In order to understand the first two appellations, it is necessary that I should state in tills place that they are denominations adopted by me, (in my work on Abortion and Menstruation,) to signify certain modifications of the latter function, which have been considered and treated as diseases, and as such variously denominated by nosologists and others. In the work alluded to, wishing to simplify as well as to rectify the uncertain and incorrect nomenclature generally employed in such cases, I formed, and have ever after used the following scheme of classification.