John Creery Ferguson 1802-1865: Physician and fetologist.

THE great obstetricians of the 18th century did much to reduce the suffering of women in pregnancy and childbirth. It is all the more remarkable that in their copious writings on the care of expectant mothers the condition of the fetus is rarely mentioned and played little or no part in determining the management of women in childbirth. The reason for this however is quite clear: apart from noting such unequivocal evidence of fetal death and decomposition as a foul smelling vaginal discharge, there was no reliable method in those days of assessing the vitality of the unborn infant. Auscultation upon which our knowledge of fetal well-being still largely relies today did not become a practical proposition until after Laennec had invented the stethoscope and perfected the technique of mediate auscultation in the second decade of the last century. Immediate auscultation that is with the ear applied directly to the patient had apparently been tried early in the history of medicine. There is a single and as it happens, erroneous observation in the Hippocratic Treatise "Concerning Diseases" where we read: "You shall know that the chest contains water and not pus, if on applying the ear for a time to the patient's side you perceive a noise like boiling vinegar". I