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Sudden death from cold baths and cold drinks has been known for many centuries. Mauriceau mentions death from cold baptism on the head, and Graseccus, Scaliger, Rush, Schenck, and Velschius mention deaths from cold drinks. Aventii, Fabricius Hildanus, the Ephemerides, and Curry relate instances of a fatal issue following the ingestion of cold water by an individual in a superheated condition.

Morgagni describes a supernumerary left nympha, and Petit is accredited with seeing a case which exhibited neither nymphae, clitoris, nor urinary meatus. Mauriceau performed nymphotomy on a woman whose nymphae were so long as to render coitus difficult. Morand quotes a case of congenital malformation of the nymphae, to which he attributed impotency.

In the first case the mother was infected in pregnancy; the other was nursing a patient when seven months pregnant; she did not take the disease, although she had been infected many months before. Mauriceau delivered a woman of a healthy child at full term after she had recovered from a severe attack of this disease during the fifth month of gestation.

For more than a century, however, Mauriceau remained a pioneer with few or no followers. It would be inconvenient, the opinion went, even if it were necessary, to forbid intercourse during pregnancy.

In the older works, the following authors have reported cases of pregnancy before the appearance of menstruation: Ballonius, Vogel, Morgagni, the anatomist of the kidney, Schenck, Bartholinus, Bierling, Zacchias, Charleton, Mauriceau, Ephemerides, and Fabricius Hildanus.

Mauriceau supposed the child to be immune after the delivery. Vidal reported to the French Academy of Medicine, May, 1871, the case of a woman who gave birth to a living child of about six and one-half months' maturation, which died some hours after birth covered with the pustules of seven or eight days' eruption.

Fabricius Hildanus and Boarton report similar instances. Bourton cites among others the case of an infant who was found living twelve hours after the death of his mother. Dufour and Mauriceau are two older French medical writers who discuss this subject.

In December of the same year she was unexpectedly delivered of another child, a product of superfetation, which proclaimed the crime that she had so cunningly concealed before. Marcellus Donatus, Goret, Schacher, and Mauriceau mention superfetation.

For more than sixteen hundred years the question, having fallen into the hands of the theologians, seems to have been neglected on the medical side until in 1721 a distinguished French obstetrician, Mauriceau, stated that no pregnant woman should have intercourse during the last two months and that no woman subject to miscarriage should have intercourse at all during pregnancy.

The Ephemerides gives the odor of urine as provocative of abortion; Sulzberger, Meyer, and Albertus all mention odors; and Vesti gives as a plausible cause the odor of carbonic vapor. The Ephemerides mentions singultus as a cause of abortion. Mauriceau, Pelargus, and Valentini mention coughing. Hippocrates mentions the case of a woman who induced abortion by calling excessively loud to some one.