In the blog we have talked about stone babies, a strange case of dead and calcified fetuses fruit of an extrauterine pregnancy. The lithopedion exist, although there are not too many documented cases: There are less than three hundred cases reported in the medical literature accumulated over 400 years.
The oldest lithopedion was found in an archaeological excavation in the 90s, dated 1100 BC. C. Professor Leland Bement discovered the well preserved remains of what at first looked like a woman with some kind of mummified baby. A subsequent inspection of pathologists Christine and Bruce Rotschild confirmed that it was a lithopedion.
In 1996 a fetus of the fourth century was found in Costebelle, France. At first it was thought to be a case of congenital syphilis, but then it was confirmed that it was a seven month calcified fetus.
However, the cases of lithopedion or stone babies They are already mentioned in the medical literature of the eleventh century, thanks to the treatise of surgery of the Arab doctor Albucasis. This treaty spread throughout Europe and was written about similar cases in several countries.
In the 16th century the Strasbourg doctor Israel Spach included an illustration of a lithopedion inside a woman's open uterus. At this time the explanation for the phenomenon was still quite mythological, and several cases are documented in the medical literature of the time and later centuries.
The first operation in the United States to withdraw a lithopedion It was performed in 1759 by John Baird in New York. In Norway there is evidence that in 1813 a woman had been "pregnant" for 10 years and through an incision above her navel they removed several remains of a stone baby.
Modern cases of stone babies
In recent times, lithopedion cases have been documented with reliable and more concrete data. In 1955 in a small village on the outskirts of Casablanca (Morocco), Zahra Aboutalib, 26, is pregnant with her first child. Childbirth goes wrong, he is afraid to go to the hospital and the baby seems to die inside.
In some places the Moroccan culture believes that a baby can "sleep" in the mother's breast for as long as it is, and Zahra wanted it. Until he was 75 years old and beaten by severe pain and after being examined by several specialists, it was decided to extract that large lump in the belly that was a calcified fetus of 46 years of age.
In 1960 Woodbury J. W. & Jarret J. C., in his article "Abdominal lithopedion retained for 13 years. Case report with review" exposes the case of a woman who had a lithopedion in her abdomen for more than 13 years. They also report a report of an intrauterine lithopedion removed while "it was curled around the neck of its living twin."
In 1966 it was discovered in Toronto that a woman who had had abdominal pain for years and with irregular periods had a calcified fetus in your abdomen. Through a laparotomy, a calcified mass was extracted ovally. The pathological diagnosis was "calcified omentum and degenerated placenta".
In 1995, the medical journal "The Lancet" reported that a 92-year-old American woman had a lithopedion inside her body. In 1999, Madigan Military Hospital in Washington said a 67-year-old woman had a calcified fetus of 39.
The 21st century
Although it is currently very simple to document these strange cases, there is also the circumstance that advances in detecting extrauterine pregnancies make it increasingly difficult for these "stone" babies to be formed. That is why many of the most recent cases occur in rural settings, without access to medical services.
In 2000, in Brazil, a 40-year-old woman who complained of lower abdominal pain was reported. The woman reported that 18 years before she had had a pregnancy and that in the third trimester she began to feel strong cramps in the lower abdomen at the same time that she stopped feeling the movements of the fetus. He thought of an abortion, but when the pain returned years later and he had medical examinations, a 31-week-old fetus was partially calcified.
In that same year a black woman from South Africa, 80 years old, showed up at the outpatient department with severe abdominal pain. An x-ray showed the skeleton of a fully developed (34 week) extrauterine fetus and wrapped in a calcification mantle. The woman had felt this mass for 40 years.
Democratic Republic of the Congo, China, Russia, Mexico, Honduras ... are other countries where cases have been documented recently.
If you want to know more about the theme of "stone" babies, the National Library of Medicine of the United States collects several documented cases with images of the lithopeds, and there is in recent times abundant bibliography in this regard.
