C., born 1854,
married in 1867, and who had a daughter ten months after. This
daughter married in 1882, and in March, 1883, gave birth to a
9-pound boy. The youthful grandmother, not twenty-nine, was
present at the birth. This case was remarkable, as the children
were both legitimate.
Fecundity in the old seems to have attracted fully as much
attention among the older observers as precocity. Pliny speaks of
Cornelia, of the family of Serpios, who bore a son at sixty, who
was named Volusius Saturnius; and Marsa, a physician of Venice,
was deceived in a pregnancy in a woman of sixty, his diagnosis
being "dropsy." Tarenta records the history of the case of a
woman who menstruated and bore children when past the age of
sixty. Among the older reports are those of Blanchard of a woman
who bore a child at sixty years; Fielitz, one at sixty;
Ephemerides, one at sixty-two; Rush, one at sixty; Bernstein, one
at sixty years; Schoepfer, at seventy years; and, almost beyond
belief, Debes cites an instance as taking place at the very
advanced age of one hundred and three. Wallace speaks of a woman
in the Isle of Orkney bearing children when past the age of
sixty. We would naturally expect to find the age of child-bearing
prolonged in the northern countries where the age of maturity is
later.
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