Maternal Death: Scotland’s Enlightenment

Death in life and life in death: melancholy and the enlightenment.

This article, which deals with the 17th and 18th centuries, is concerned with the presence of death in the melancholiac's life as revealed in both the accounts written by sufferers themselves and medical works. It shows the exceptional place which melancholiacs consider themselves to occupy, compared to the rest of the living, as they inhabit the no-man's-land between life and death. The privil...

Maternal brain death.

Pregnancy is a biological process that usually takes forty weeks. The more advanced pregnancy is in terms of gestational age, the higher the chances that the fetus would survive in case of a premature and unnatural delivery. Hence, when a pregnant woman is struck by brain death, the fetus’ chances of survival are seriously and immediately threatened. Until recently, there were two choices in su...

Maternal death surveillance and response.

Of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the goal of reducing maternal mortality is the one that remains the furthest from reaching its targets.'"•' The inability to reliably measure levels and trends contributes to a lack of accountability and, in turn, to lack of progress. A maternal death surveillance and response system that includes maternal death identification, reporting...

Indirect causes of maternal death.

Indirect causes of maternal death.

We read with interest the WHO systematic analysis of global causes of maternal death (June issue) and the WHO maternal mortality trends report and press release. However, we urge caution regarding calls for policymakers, funding bodies, and health actors to give greater importance to indirect than direct causes of maternal mortality. With the exception of HIV infection, the systematic analysis ...