Stone child from Sens
The stone child of Sens was a lithopedionist who was removed from his mother's womb 28 years after the natural due date.
Finding
Madame Colombe Chatri from Sens (Burgundy), the wife of the tailor Loys Carita, showed all signs of normal pregnancy in 1554 at the age of 40 . This properly ended with breakthrough of the amniotic fluid and labor , but the child was not born. Colombe Chatri survived this incident but was bedridden for the next three years and continued to suffer pain. Although she felt the unborn child as a hard swelling in her womb, she reached the age of 68.
After her death in 1582, the widower had Claude le Noir and Iehan Coutas dissect her. They found a large egg-like structure in the mother's womb that they could only break open with force. After discovering that there was a full term but petrified baby inside the shell, they called in a number of doctors to examine them, including Jean d'Ailleboust . At the same time, the case attracted many curious people, and in the desire to free the child from its shell and study more closely, those involved destroyed the hard cover before it could be examined more closely. The child's right hand was also broken off.
The child, a girl, was fixed in a crouching position with his head tilted slightly to the right. The fontanelles were open and the baby had a single tooth.
First investigations
The discovery of this lithopedion caused a sensation. D'Ailleboust wrote a description of the child and the autopsy, which was printed by Jean Sauvine in Sens in 1582 and which sold well. It was called Portentosum Lithopaedion, sive Embryum Petrificatum Urbis Senonensis . Soon after, a translation of this work into French, which the doctor Siméon de Provanchères had obtained: Le prodigieux enfant pétrifié de la ville de Sens . D'Ailleboust's theory about the origin of the stone child - the mother's blood was too dry - soon found its critics. De Provanchères already added a supplement to his translation in which he advocated the view that the embryo had dried out in the womb due to insufficient temperature. François de Bosset, a contemporary of these two doctors, was more concerned with the substance in which the child was locked. De Bosset assumed that it was too tightly attached to the mother and that the birth was impossible.
Images of the stone child by Sens have also been published since the first publication. D'Ailleboust had included a picture in his treatise showing Colombe Chatri in a half-sitting position naked on a bed, her stomach cut open and the child depicted lying next to her. Jan Bondeson suspects that a contemporary erotic drawing served as a model for this representation, in which the stone child was only inserted. D'Ailleboust himself did not give any precise information about the origin of the picture, but only claimed that it was drawn from statues of Phidias .
In any case, the illustration that Ambroise Paré added to his publication Des monstres et prodiges should be closer to reality . Paré was a contemporary of d'Ailleboust and had the opportunity to examine the stone child of Sens closely. A publication by Israel Spach entitled Gyneciorum , which is often incorrectly dated to 1557, actually dates from 1597 and uses the information provided by d'Ailleboust.
The Odyssey of the Stone Child
From the start, it wasn't just medical professionals who were interested in the case. In the 1590s, the wealthy merchant Prestesiegle acquired the stone child of Sens and placed it in his private museum in Paris . There Louyse Bourgeois also had the opportunity to examine the lithopedion. She republished d'Ailleboust's pictorial representation of the child. The stone child later passed into the possession of the Parisian goldsmith Estienne Carteron, who in turn sold it to Venice on February 12, 1628 . The new owner was called Gillebert Bodëy and was a jeweler. In Venice in the 1640s, the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin saw the stone child of Sens. Probably this informed the Danish King Friedrich III. about the curiosity. Friedrich III. From the 1650s he built up an extensive collection of curiosities in Copenhagen , which he also incorporated the entire collection of Ole Worm into . In 1653 he bought the Steinkind von Sens together with the purchase contract of 1628 and a handwritten copy of the autopsy report from d'Ailleboust including an illustration. These documents have been preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen to this day. There are various details about the purchase price that the king had to pay - the only thing that is certain is that it must have been high.
Bartholin wrote a more precise description of the stone child than it was in Denmark. It was published in his work Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum, Centuria I – II , printed in Amsterdam in 1654 . At this point the lithopedion had already suffered a lot. Both arms were broken off and in some places the skeleton was visible under the broken skin and muscles. A catalog of the royal museum, which Bartholin's relative Holger Jacobsen made in 1696, shows the condition of the specimen at that time. The 1710 catalog mentioned other damage - what was still visible of the child's skin had now mostly turned black. In 1737 the Stone Child of Sens was still in the royal collection; the catalog from that year notes - without a picture - that the remains have now been kept in a glass case.
In the 1820s, the royal collection was disbanded. Some of the holdings were auctioned off, some were thrown away and a third was transferred to other collections. The stone child of Sens was brought to the Danish Museum of Natural History in 1826. In the late 19th century, the holdings of this museum were taken over by the Copenhagen Zoological Museum . The stone child of Sens was no longer among the exhibits that took part in this change of location. Subsequent inquiries into the whereabouts were unsuccessful.
Thomas Bartholin's drawing
Holger Jacobsen's drawing
meaning
The stone child of Sens was the first documented lithopedion. According to a compilation by Friedrich Küchenmeister, 47 cases were known by 1880 , and around 300 cases had been described by January 2010.
Lithopädia has been divided into three subgroups since the time the kitchen was mastered: In the case of lithokelyphos, only the membranes, but not the fetus itself, are hardened; in the actual lithopedion or lithoteknon, the child itself has been preserved by calcium deposits, and in the case of lithokelyphopaedion, both the child and the surrounding membrane are hardened. The stone child of Sens belonged to this last type. The majority of all cases occurred in ectopic pregnancies . There are no recent reports of stone infants lying within the uterus. If, as the report by d'Ailleboust suggests , the stone child of Sens actually lain in an intact uterus, this is a peculiarity. Bondeson supports the theory that Colombe Chatri ruptured a uterus and then the child into hers Abdominal cavity got where it was remodeled to lithopedion.
literature
- Jan Bondeson : The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 2004, ISBN 080148958X , pp. 39-50
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helen King: Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynecology. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007, ISBN 978-0754653967 , p. 120
- ^ J. Bondeson: The earliest known case of a lithopaedion . In: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine . 89, No. 1, January 1996, pp. 13-18. PMID 8709075 . PMC 1295635 (free full text).