The Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia.
expose the bad effects of these, and to recommend to his fellow practitioners mild cathartics, and the use of opiates, a practice which was afterwards adopted and highly recommended by Dr. Warren, of London. The appendix to this essay is a very interesting case of Mollities Ossium, occurring in a woman aged forty, who in health was five feet high, "but after death, though all her limbs were stretched out straight, was no more than three feet seven inches;" it is stated that the bones in her arms and legs had been so pliable for two years as to he easily bent into a curve, and for several months before her decease they "were as limber as a rag, and would bend any way, with less difficulty than the muscular parts of a healthy person's leg, without the interposition of the bones. An examination of the body was made by Dr. Cadwalader, 1742; and the post-mortem appearance of the different viscera of the chest and abdomen, as well of the bones and joints, are carefully detailed.[1]
- ↑ This was one of the first recorded post-mortem examinations made in the American Colonies. The only notice of one made previously to this, of which I am aware, is noted in the early Dutch records of New York, viz., that on the body of the English Governor, Sloughter, in 1691, who was suspected of having died from poison.
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