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John Anthony Alvan Nichols
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An Introduction to Nutritional Medicine
Health, Fitness & Dieting
Author Insight
Pregnancy sickness unmasked
Pregnancy sickness is a mystery that just doesn't make sense. Why would women be unable to eat and drink normally at a time when good nutrition is so important to the developing fetus. However, consideration of nutritional factors against a Darwinian backcloth does finally make some sense as explained in my book. Some degree of reflex nausea warns women against unsuitable foods that do her no harm but might harm the unborn child. Surely, I hear you say, it shouldn't be so severe that it could kill the mother and child as with poor Charlotte Bronte - difficult to explain but you have to take into account Darwin's rule that natural selection does not deliver perfection but just an adaption that is "good enough" and Charlotte's death is an example of such an "imperfection".
Book Excerpt
An Introduction to Nutritional Medicine
In 1855 a 39-year-old woman died from pregnancy sickness. She was so thin from malnutrition and dehydration that the certifying doctor mistook the cause of death as being tuberculosis, a disease that had killed three of her siblings. Her symptoms were, however, typical of the severe form of pregnancy sickness now referred to as hyperemesis gravidarum. This was the poet and author Charlotte Bronte whose most famous work is the novel “Jane Eyre”. This death particularly saddens me as one of the brightest minds of the nineteenth century was snuffed out by a condition that can easily be treated with an intravenous electrolyte drip and ant-emetic medication nowadays. But 170 years ago, for most of human history and back into the stone age, hyperemesis gravidarum was frequently a fatal disorder.
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