TREATMENT. Healthy physical and mental ex ercise is one of the best preventives of this accident. In families where the mother or grandmother aborted frequently, special care of diet, exercise, and clothing should be taken. Constipation should he avoided by the use of water and the green vegetables. Should the symptoms mentioned occur, the woman should lie down, absolutely quiet, on her back and call her regular medical attendant.
There are occasional cases (as where the out let of the pelvis is very contracted) in which it is necessary for physicians to induce abortion. It cannot be too generally known that all at tempts at procuring criminal abortion, either by the administration of powerful drugs or the ap plication of instruments, are accompanied with extreme danger to the pregnant woman. It can not be too earnestly impressed upon the mind of those who are tempted to procure a criminal abortion by means of drugs that the danger of causing death is very serious. Many so-called emmenagogues (q.v.), which induce the menstrual
flow in a woman who is not pregnant, but is merely suffering from amenorrhoea, or suppres sion of the menses, are abortifacients only when given in such doses as to endanger life, or to set up violent internal inflammations. Among these are the various preparations of ergot of rye savin (the most powerful of all emmena gogues), borax, rue, tansy, eantharides, etc. In the South, among the ignorant negroes. concoc tions of pennyroyal and cotton-root bark are used for the same purpose. The milder emmena gognes, such as iron, aloes, etc., have no abortive tendency, except in the case of those women who are predisposed to abort. Violent purgatives, in eases where they have caused abortion, have not done so because they directly exercise an echolie effect on the uterus, but. only as a secondary con sequence of the excessive intestinal irritation which they cause.