the news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usages of the sublime porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation that an heir had been born. when he had betaken himself to the women's apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous exhaustion and approbation, the delegates, chafing under the length and solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and officer rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of tongues. in vain the voice of mr canvasser bloom was heard endeavouring to urge, to mollify, to restrain. the moment was too propitious for the display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among tempers so divergent. every phase of the situation was successively eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the caesarean section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the childs murder and endered memorable by the impassioned plea of mr advocate bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the rights of primogeniture and king's bounty touching twins and triplets, miscarriages and infanticides, simulated and dissimulated, acardiac ftus in ftu, aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnatia of certain chinless chinamen (cited by mr candidate mulligan) in consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetuation of the species in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing manner of delivery called by the brandenburghers sturzgeburt, the recorded instances of multigeminal, twikindled and monstrous births conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents - in a word all the cases of human nativity which aristotle has classified in his master-piece with chromolithographic illustrations. the gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a country stile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation. the abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as a primafacie and natural hypothetical ex
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