Pare seemed to be well conversant
with the possibility as well as the actuality of superfetation;
and Harvey reports that a certain maid, gotten with child by her
master, in order to hide her knavery came to London in September,
where she lay in by stealth, and being recovered, returned home.
In December of the same year she was unexpectedly delivered of
another child, a product of superfetation, which proclaimed the
crime that she had so cunningly concealed before.
Marcellus Donatus, Goret, Schacher, and Mauriceau mention
superfetation. In the Academie des Sciences, at Paris, in 1702,
there was mentioned the case of a woman who was delivered of a
boy; in the placenta was discovered a sort of bladder which was
found to contain a female fetus of the age of from four to five
months; and in 1729, before the same society, there was an
instance in which two fetuses were born a day apart, one aged
forty days and the other at full term. From the description, it
does not seem possible that either of these were blighted twin
pregnancies. Ruysch gives an account of a surgeon's wife at
Amsterdam, in 1686, who was delivered of a strong child which
survived, and, six hours after, of a small embryo, the funis of
which was full of hydatids and the placenta as large and thick as
one of three months.
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