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The Lancet relates an account of the birth of quintuplets, 2 boys and 3 girls, by the wife of a peasant on March 1, 1854. Moffitt records the birth at Monticello, Ill., of quintuplets. The woman was thirty-five years of age; examination showed a breech presentation; the second child was born by a foot-presentation, as was the third, but the last was by a head-presentation.
Bedford speaks of 4 children at a birth, averaging 5 pounds each, and all nursing the mother. In the year 1731 there was one case of quintuplets in Upper Saxony and another near Prague, Bohemia. In both of these cases the children were all christened and had all lived to maturity.
Within a year after her marriage she gave birth to twins; in the next year to triplets; in the third year to quadruplets; in the fourth year to quintuplets, and in the fifth year bore sextuplets; in this last labor she died. The then present Lord de Maldemeure, he says, was one of the final sextuplets. This case attracted great notice at the time, as the family was quite noble and very well known.
Petritus, a Greek physician, speaks of the birth of quintuplets at the seventh month. Two males and one female were born dead, being attached to the same placenta; the others were united to a common placenta and lived three days. Chambon mentions an instance of 5 at a birth.
The insurance must be taken out before the existence of twins in the uterus can be diagnosed that is, in the first two or three months of gestation. One twin birth occurs to about 90 single births, one triple to about 8000, and one quadruple to about 650,000. In all medical literature only about 30 cases of quintuplets have been recorded.
Not far from Berne, Switzerland, the wife of John Gelinger, a preacher in the Lordship of Berne, brought forth twins, and within a year after she brought forth quintuplets, 3 sons and 2 daughters. There is a similar instance reported in 1827 of a woman of twenty-seven who, having been delivered of twins two years before, was brought to bed with 5 children, 3 boys and 2 girls.
Kennedy showed before the Dublin Pathological Society 5 fetuses with the involucra, the product of an abortion at the third month. At Naples in 1839 Giuseppa Califani gave birth to 5 children; and about the same time Paddock reported the birth in Franklin County, Pa., of quintuplets.
In the same journal was reported the birth at Wells, Somersetshire, in 1739, of 4 boys and a girl, all of whom were christened and were healthy. Pare in 1549 gives several instances of 5 children at a birth, and Pliny reports that in the peninsula of Greece there was a woman who gave birth to quintuplets on four different occasions.
Cases in which there is a repetition of multiple births are quite numerous, and sometimes so often repeated as to produce a family the size of which is almost incredible. Aristotle is credited with saying that he knew the history of a woman who had quintuplets four times.
You may take the initiative by introducing into family conversation some topic of current interest which will promote questions incubator babies, the Dionne quintuplets, child marriages, the recent thirteen-year-old father. Pets are marvelous biological laboratories white mice, rabbits, puppies, snakes, turtles. Of course there must be mates and matings.
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