Recognition of the long-term sequelae of eclampsia

Abstract

In November 1934 I first went to the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital as a clinical chemist. It was the depths of the Depression. I had a PhD in Zoology and had never heard of preeclampsia. In the late 1930s the predominant obstetric opinion was that the hypertensive disorders in and of pregnancy were attributable to renal insufficiency. Chronic hypertension in women of childbearing age pointed to chronic nephritis because the women were not old enough to have senile plethora, the term that Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt1 had used in differentiating what we now call essential hypertension from primary renal disease.