The Foetal Circulation: 7Th Edition

By Alan Gilchrist

The Book. It is in two sections, the first describing the author's experiences as a government medical officer in southern Africa in the middle of the last century, which led to his finding the long-hidden secrets of the foetal circulation. The second describes how he uncovered the secrets, and gives an account of each part which completely demolishes the long-held orthodox accounts. The foetal heart sounds are described which may be heard with a Doppler foetal heart monitor. The birth changes, which no one has ever seen, and probably never will, are guessed at in full detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665591294

Alan Gilchrist

The author’s father was the manager of a biscuit factory in an industrial area of north west London. He had served in the Great War, and after the war his first wife died in the 1919 flu pandemic, leaving him with a young daughter. He remarried and had another four children, Alan being the second. With scant formal education themselves, he and his wife were able to off er all the children a good education, and to Alan a medical one as well. It was during a biology class in his first year in the medical school that the author first heard about two streams of blood in the same chamber of the heart. In 1956, ‘by a set of curious chances’ (The Mikado), the author found himself in the setting he had dreamt about when he was a little boy: practising medicine in rural Africa. This was in Nyasaland, part of the former Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. (Now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi). In 1962 he was posted to Zomba as medical superintendent and met Pauline who had been born in the same hospital 21 years previously. The following year they were married, and immediately after the reception left for Fort Victoria in Rhodesia, where he had been offered the post of medical superintendent. Those were momentous times: bringing up a young family in a rapidly changing African environment and practising medicine in the midst of it. The story would make interesting reading, but the author has put it aside and only shown the details of his investigations of the foetal circulation in his little book.

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© 2021 Alan Gilchrist. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-6655-9130-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9129-4 (e)

Published by AuthorHouse 08/20/2021

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Contents

Dedication.

Acknowledgements.

Fort Johnston.

Blantyre.

Dedza

Mzuzu.

Lilongwe

Zomba

Fort Victoria

The Foetal Circulation

The Junction

The circulation for the upper body

The circulation for the placenta.

The circulation for the lower body.

The Foetal Lungs

The left atrium and the foramen ovale.

The Foetal Heart Sounds.

The Birth Changes.

Reference.

Dedication.

This seventh edition is specially dedicated to the memory of Pauline, and to the four children she gave us, Peter Andrew Elizabeth and Mary.

Acknowledgements.

First and foremost, I am very grateful to my son Andrew who keeps an eye on me and keeps me alive by doing my weekly shopping. I must thank Sophia Anderton again for allowing me to publish data from the British Journal of Radiology in the 6th edition, a small part of which is included in this one. John Quinn has again come out of retirement to help with the reproduction and placing of the diagrams and pictures, and I thank him sincerely for his dedicated work.

Between 1953 and 1963, prosperous Northern and Southern Rhodesia were joined with Nyasaland to form the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, to help Nyasaland with few natural resources. The story I am about to relate begins in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, when I went there in December 1954. After seven and a half years in Nyasaland, now known as Malawi, I returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1963, and the story ends there in 1969. The events in Nyasaland may seem to have no bearing on the foetal circulation, but I consider them to be steppingstones back to Rhodesia where I uncovered its long- hidden secrets.

I first became interested in the foetal circulation in a biology lesson when I was a medical student and heard about two different streams of blood in the right atrium of the foetal heart. I pricked up my ears, I did not doubt it but wondered how it was done. Some years later after qualification, during my National Service, I was returning to England from Malaya in a troopship in the middle of the Indian Ocean and decided on