TH.

=Still-birth.=--The infant cries almost as soon as it comes into the
world. The cry is the evidence that air has entered its lungs, that the
blood has now begun to take a different course from that which it
followed before birth, and that the child has entered on a new
existence. The child who does not cry, does not breathe; it is said to
be _still-born_; its quietude means death.

After a long or a difficult labour, or after the use of instruments, the
child is sometimes still-born in consequence of blood being poured out
on its brain, and it is thus killed before birth by apoplexy. This,
however, is not usually the case, but the child is generally still-born
because some cause or other, generally the protraction of labour,
interfered with the due changes of its blood within the womb, and it is
born suffocated before its birth, and consequently unable to make the
necessary efforts to breathe afterwards.

Drowned people are often resuscitated; the child's case is analogous to
theirs; and in both the same measures have to be pursued, namely to try
to establish respiration. The degree of the warmth of the child's body,
the resistance of its muscles, the red tint or the white colour of its
surface, the presence or absence of perceptible beating of its heart,
measure the chances of success. Sometimes mere exposure to the cold air
produces the necessary effect; at other times breathing is excited by
dashing cold water in the child's face, by slapping it, by tickling its
nostrils, or by dipping it for a few seconds in a hot bath at 100 deg. or
102 deg.; and then swinging it a few times backwards and forwards in the
air.

Much time, however, must not be lost over these proceedings, but the
child must be laid on its back, the lower part of its body well wrapped
up, the chest slightly raised by a folded napkin placed under it. The
two arms must then be taken firmly, raised and slowly extended on either
side of the head, then brought down again and gently pressed on either
side of the chest; and this movement of alternate raising and extending
the arms and bringing them back again beside the chest must be repeated
regularly some thirty times in the minute, thus imitating the movements
of the chest in breathing. These efforts, too, must not be discontinued
so long as the surface retains its warmth, and as an occasional
heart-beat shows that life is not absolutely extinct; and I believe that
in many instances failure is