On many occasions, health professionals , especially those working in the emergency department, find very strange objects inside people.In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was something that certain frequency the doctors found it housed in the bladder of women: Elm bark, a historical abortion and its dangers. Why was it in the bladder and not in the uterus?
Elm bark, a dangerous abortion
Many women throughout history have found themselves in need of terminating a pregnancy.In ancient Babylon, If a woman aborted her punishment it was to die impaled , however, in Greece and Rome, carrying out the pregnancy was generally left at the discretion of the mother , when the state did not intervene to regulate the population, and the doctors had no problem in carrying out the operation.
With the arrival of Christianity this prac Tica change and from the second century there are laws condemning the banishment of women who had aborted and punishing those who had practiced it.
In the Middle Ages and following San Agustin , a distinction was made between corpus formatum and corpus informatum to decide whether an abortion was comparable to a homicide or not.At 40 days the fetuses of men and 80 of women, they were considered to receive the soul and therefore could not be aborted freely. From Seventeenth century severe laws were enacted criminalizing abortion and it was not until the early twentieth century that it began to be legislated in some countries for cases such as when the life of the mother was in danger, etc.Currently each country has its legislation more or less permissive However, for centuries the circumstances and dangers that women ran to get abortion were in many cases You are chilling .Among the most common methods used in past centuries are some such as needles to make calceta, the hanger or the elm bark .
He was an early English physician 20th century the one who reported several cases in which he had found elm bark , of a variety known as "slippery elm", in the bladder of his patients and wanted to know how he got there.The answer was simple: It was a mistake when trying to introduce the elm bark into the cervix to cause a abortion .To produce the effect that women were looking for, the inner part of the bark of the elm was soaked, which became extremely slippery and was introduced vaginally.In this process, some fragment was fac If he slipped into the bladder and stayed there, forming stones and causing discomfort and infections.
The slippery elm bark, located in the cervix, absorbs water and inflates, causes contractions and inducing labor or to abortion.The problem with this system was that infections that could be deadly occur very easily.The slippery elm bark is not sterile and usually contains spores of the bacteria that cause the call gas gangrene, because of which many women who underwent this abortion procedure died.
Sadly, in some places women are still using this very dangerous and historic interruption system today cion of a pregnancy.If you want to know more about the history of contraception or abortion, you may want to read:
-Infanticide, abortion and contraception in Ancient Greece
Image: Ulmus Toulousse Lautrec "The medical inspection" (1894)
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