Medicine: Abdomen Baby

The patient, a pregnant, 29-year-old Negro woman, had complained for months of severe pains in her abdomen. One day last week, as she approached full term, the pains got worse. In the osteopathic unit of Los Angeles County General Hospital, doctors X-rayed her, found to their astonishment that the uterus was only slightly enlarged. The baby was not there; it was thrashing about in the abdomen, its head under the liver and the rest of its body lodged against the stomach and intestines.

An abdominal pregnancy, especially one that proceeds to full term, is extremely rare, and almost invariably fatal to the...

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