must not be received without qualification. We admit that under such circumstances a portion of the lungs will become inflated, and therefore swim in water; but it would appear from the more precise and comprehensive views of later physiologists, that respiration is not completely performed on the first effort, but that it is a process gradually advancing to perfection; and that it will be more or less protracted according to the degree of vigour of which the infant is possessed. Portal has shewn by experiments[1] that the air enters the right lung sooner than the left, and that the left lobe is very often not at all dilated for several days. The same fact was observed by Blancardi.[2] Dr. Hutchinson states that he was informed by a late physician to the Foundling-hospital at Naples, who opened daily, on an average, the bodies of ten or twelve infants, which had generally died within twenty-four hours after birth, that he hardly ever found more than a very small portion of the lungs dilated by air; this portion was frequently not larger than a walnut in its green shell, and but rarely larger than a hen's egg, and it was commonly situate in the right lung.[3] "I have seen," continues the author above cited, "a case where the right lobe, when separated from the left, sank in water, though this was the most dilated by respiration, and the infant had lived forty hours, and cried pretty strongly: but it died from suffocation by being overlaid, as it is popularly termed, by the mother, which
- ↑ Memoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, Année, 1769.
- ↑ Anatom. Reform. p. 71.
- ↑ It should be understood, adds Dr. Hutchinson, that these children had never been fed before they were placed in the turning box at the hospital; which, perhaps, with the want of due warmth, &c. may have prevented their lungs being as much dilated as those of children of the same age, under ordinary circumstances.
