Note 13 — OF THE MODE BY WHICH PREGNANCY MAY BE DETERMINED.

“A woman came to me one morning,” says Dr. Gooch, “with a note from a medical man, containing the following statement: The patient’s age was forty-two; she had been married twenty-two years without ever being pregnant. About seven months ago she had ceased to menstruate; a few months afterwards the abdomen began to enlarge, and was now nearly equal to that of full pregnancy. For several months the practitioner had been using various means for reducing the tumour, but in vain. I examined the case, pronounced her pregnant, and seven weeks afterward she brought forth a child at the full time.”

Dr. Montgomery says: “A lady in her forty-third year, who was married to her present husband twenty years ago, remained without any promise of offspring until within the last few months; but having missed her menstruation in September last, and finding her size increasing, I was requested to see her in January, when she exhibited evident symptoms of pregnancy. She was subsequently delivered of a healthy boy, after a natural labor of about four hours.”

Mosse, one of the medical officers of the Dublin Lying-in-Hospital in 1775, states, that eighty-four of the women delivered in the Institution under his superintendence were between the ages of forty-one and fifty-four; four of these were in the fifty-first year, and one in her fifty-fourth.

In May, 1816, Mrs. Ashley, wife of John Ashley, grazier, of Frisby, at the age of fifty-four years was delivered of two female children.

The succession to an estate was disputed in France because the mother was fifty-eight years old when the child was born. The decision was in favour of the fact.