I've been ticking along with my pleasant slow read of War & Peace. My college friend Stephan is doing it too, and occasionally one of us will send the other an enthusiastic text. But I am having some thoughts about the chapter in which Prince Andrei's son is born, and I don't think Stephan is the right audience for them.
Spoilers for a 160-year-old book: Prince Andrei returns from the war to find his wife in labor. He listens from the next room. Here's how it goes down in the Project Gutenberg version:
He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she could not scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.
“What have they taken a baby in there for?” thought Prince Andrew in the first second. “A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or is the baby born?”
Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill he began to cry, sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out of the room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor gave him a bewildered look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and seeing Prince Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into his wife’s room. She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming childlike face.
Part I of the weirdness is that I remember half of this vividly. Our professor talked about Prince Andrei's moment of confusion when he heard the baby cry, and that particular moment has stayed with me since 1990. But how, friends, HOW did I forget that in the very next paragraph he found his wife dead?
Part 2 of the weirdness is that I do not think this makes sense obstetrically. Probably 1990 Jamie thought, "Ah, yes, women died in childbirth all the time in 1806." But deaths in childbirth have a mechanism. This doesn't add up, right? She was making loud noises right until the baby was born. The baby wasn't in bad shape -- he was making a good respiratory effort if his cries could be heard clearly in the next room -- but then something so sudden and final happened that the doctor walked away without attempting to save the princess.
What could it have been? I don't think you can push effectively and scream loudly with fulminant eclampsia, can you? That doesn't really sound like someone having a seizure or a stroke, right? And I know that lots of women bled out after childbirth, but it takes a little time to bleed to death. Even in 1806, they were massaging hemorrhaging uteri, weren't they? What causes sudden maternal death with no hope of effective intervention? Amniotic fluid embolism?
Dr. Google says that placenta previa was the "condition which aroused more anxiety in the attendant and was more dangerous to the mother than any other complication of childbirth." Maybe that was it, but I'm not convinced. Five minutes from actively pushing to so-persuasively-dead-the-doctor-walked-away -- is that plausible?
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