The Foetal Circulation

About the Book

It is in 3 parts, with generous illustrations throughout. The first part gives a brief account of the author’s discovery of a foetal heart in 1965, which is followed by descriptions of his dissections of foetal lambs and the valuable information they give. The second part covers the author’s comprehensive account of the human foetal circulation, which he divides into three sections: for the upper body, lower body and placenta. The structure and function of the lung are compared with those of the placenta. Details of the foramen ovale are given, and the importance of the 3rd heart sound made by the valve. In part 3 the author gives his own ideas of the birth changes. He insists that it is the foetus which is delivered, and that the baby is born after delivery when the first deep breath is taken, which changes the hidden foetal features into those of the baby. He has suggestions for the management of delay in the onset of breathing. He shows why there has been discord between the orthodox accounts and his own. He suggests research in the chick embryo, which has a circulation similar to that of the human foetus.

About the Author

The author arrived in Bulawayo Southern Rhodesia in December 1954, and worked as an assistant to the pathologist in a private laboratory. A year later he was working peacefully as a government medical officer in a large district of Nyasaland. But the southern end of the Rift Valley was not only unstable physically but politically as well, and the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was soon to become Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was the last to arrive in 1980, and it was while that country was still Rhodesia in 1965 that the author was the medical superintendent of the hospital in Fort Victoria (Masvingo). In the hospital mortuary he discovered a foetal heart which revealed to him hitherto unknown secrets of the foetal circulation. In 1970 he opened his own medical practice in Salisbury (Harare), and worked as a G.P. until 2013 when his wife died and he returned to England. He produced his first book on the foetal circulation in Zimbabwe in 2011. He has since produced three other books on the same subject. The 5th edition is a much better version, with corrections of the errors in the first four after dissections of foetal lambs.