Capuron cites an example of child-birth in a woman of
sixty; Haller, cases at fifty-eight, sixty-three, and seventy;
Dewees, at sixty-one; and Thibaut de Chauvalon, in a woman of
Martinique aged ninety years. There was a woman delivered in
Germany, in 1723, at the age of fifty-five; one at fifty-one in
Kentucky; and one in Russia at fifty. Depasse speaks of a woman
of fifty-nine years and five months old who was delivered of a
healthy male child, which she suckled, weaning it on her sixtieth
birthday. She had been a widow for twenty years, and had ceased
to menstruate nearly ten years before. In St. Peter's Church, in
East Oxford, is a monument bearing an inscription recording the
death in child-birth of a woman sixty-two years old. Cachot
relates the case of a woman of fifty-three, who was delivered of
a living child by means of the forceps, and a year after bore a
second child without instrumental interference. She had no milk
in her breasts at the time and no signs of secretion. This aged
mother had been married at fifty-two, five years after the
cessation of her menstruation, and her husband was a young man,
only twenty-four years old.
Kennedy reports a delivery at sixty-two years, and the Cincinnati
Enquirer, January, 1863, says: "Dr.
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