第69章
They grew up and thrived, and took the name of Trazegines, meaning, in the old language, 13 drowned, although many commentaries say that "gines" was supposed to mean in the twelfth century "nes," or, in full, the interpretation would be "13born."
Cases in which there is a repetition of multiple births are quite numerous, and sometimes so often repeated as to produce a family the size of which is almost incredible. Aristotle is credited with saying that he knew the history of a woman who had quintuplets four times. Pliny's case of quintuplets four times repeated has been mentioned; and Pare, who may be believed when he quotes from his own experience, says that the wife of the last Lord de Maldemeure, who lived in the Parish of Seaux, was a marvel of prolificity. Within a year after her marriage she gave birth to twins; in the next year to triplets; in the third year to quadruplets; in the fourth year to quintuplets, and in the fifth year bore sextuplets; in this last labor she died. The then present Lord de Maldemeure, he says, was one of the final sextuplets. This case attracted great notice at the time, as the family was quite noble and very well known. Seaux, their home, was near Chambellay. Picus Mirandulae gathered from the ancient Egyptian inscriptions that the women of Egypt brought forth sometimes 8 children at a birth, and that one woman bore 30children in 4 confinements. He also cites, from the history of a certain Bishop of Necomus, that a woman named Antonia, in the Territory of Mutina, Italy, now called Modena, had brought forth 40 sons before she was forty years of age, and that she had had 3and 4 at a birth. At the auction of the San Donato collection of pictures a portrait of Dianora Frescobaldi, by one of the Bronzinos in the sixteenth century, sold for about $3000. At the bottom of this portrait was an inscription stating that she was the mother of 52 children. This remarkable woman never had less than 3 at a birth, and tradition gives her as many as 6.
Merriman quotes a case of a woman, a shopkeeper named Blunet, who had 21 children in 7 successive births. They were all born alive, and 12 still survived and were healthy. As though to settle the question as to whom should be given the credit in this case, the father or the mother, the father experimented upon a female servant, who, notwithstanding her youth and delicateness, gave birth to 3 male children that lived three weeks. According to despatches from Lafayette, Indiana, investigation following the murder, on December 22, 1895, of Hester Curtis, an aged woman of that city, developed the rather remarkable fact that she had been the mother of 25 children, including 7 pairs of twins.
According to a French authority the wife of a medical man at Fuentemajor, in Spain, forty-three years of age, was delivered of triplets 13 times. Puech read a paper before the French Academy in which he reports 1262 twin births in Nimes from 1790 to 1875, and states that of the whole number in 48 cases the twins were duplicated, and in 2 cases thrice repeated, and in one case 4times repeated.
Warren gives an instance of a lady, Mrs. M----, thirty-two years of age, married at fourteen, who, after the death of her first child, bore twins, one living a month and the other six weeks.
Later she again bore twins, both of whom died. She then miscarried with triplets, and afterward gave birth to 12 living children, as follows: July 24, 1858, 1 child; June 30, 1859, 2children; March 24, 1860, 2 children; March 1, 1861, 3 children;February 13, 1862, 4 children; making a total of 21 children in eighteen years, with remarkable prolificity in the later pregnancies. She was never confined to her bed more than three days, and the children were all healthy.
A woman in Schlossberg, Germany, gave birth to twins; after a year, to triplets, and again, in another year, to 3 fairly strong boys. In the State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I, according to Walford, appears an extract from a letter from George Garrard to Viscount Conway, which is as follows: "Sir John Melton, who entertained you at York, hath buried his wife, Curran's daughter.
Within twelve months she brought him 4 sons and a daughter, 2sons last summer, and at this birth 2 more and a daughter, all alive." Swan mentions a woman who gave birth to 6 children in seventeen months in 2 triple pregnancies. The first terminated prematurely, 2 children dying at once, the other in five weeks.
The second was uneventful, the 3 children living at the time of the report. Rockwell gives the report of a case of a woman of twenty-eight, herself a twin, who gave birth to twins in January, 1879. They died after a few weeks, and in March, 1880, she again bore twins, one living three and the other nine weeks. On March 12, 1881, she gave birth to triplets. The first child, a male, weighed 7 pounds; the second, a female, 6 1/4 pounds; the third, a male, 5 1/2 pounds. The third child lived twenty days, the other two died of cholera infantum at the sixth month, attributable to the bottle-feeding. Banerjee gives the history of a case of a woman of thirty being delivered of her fourth pair of twins. Her mother was dead, but she had 3 sisters living, of one of which she was a twin, and the other 2 were twins. One of her sisters had 2 twin terms, 1 child surviving; like her own children, all were females. A second sister had a twin term, both males, 1 surviving. The other sister aborted female twins after a fall in the eighth month of pregnancy. The name of the patient was Mussamat Somni, and she was the wife of a respectable Indian carpenter.