When the miscarriage has really taken place, and the fœtus, or child, is expelled, together with the contents of the womb, the same precautions should in general be observed as in childbirth.
TO PREVENT MISCARRIAGE,
when it is threatened, or on the appearance of the first symptoms, the patient should lie down and be as quiet as possible; live on very light diet; bowels be kept freely open; and an injection of thirty drops of laudanum should be given in half a pint of slippery elm tea. Should flooding be present, cold lemonade should be drank freely, and cloths wet with cold or ice water applied to the thighs and lower part of the birthplace, which should be repeated until the flooding is relieved.
MEANS OF PREVENTING ABORTION.
To prevent abortion, women of weak or relaxed habit should use solid food, avoiding great quantities of tea, coffee, or other weak or watery liquors. They should go soon to bed and rise early, and take frequent exercise, but avoid fatigue. They should occasionally take half a pint of the decoction of lignum-vitæ, boiling an ounce of it in a quart of water for five minutes.
If of a full habit, they ought to use a spare diet and chiefly of the vegetable kind, avoiding strong liquors and everything that may tend to heat the body or increase the quantity of blood; and when the symptoms appear, should take a dram of powdered nitre in a cup of water gruel every five or six hours.
In both cases the patient should sleep on a hard mattress and be kept cool and quiet; the bowels should be kept regular by a pill of white walnut extract or bitterroot.
CHAPTER IX.
MENSTRUATION.
Though this is not a disease, but a healthy function, and as, from various causes, derangement of the function occurs, it is proper that it should be perfectly understood. Menstruation is the term applied to the phenomenon that attends the rupture of what is called the Graafian follicles of the ovaries and the discharge of an ova, or egg. It is a bloody discharge from the female genitals; not differing from ordinary blood, excepting that it does not coagulate, and in its peculiar odor. The blood comes from the capillaries of the womb and vagina.