Medicine: Stone Baby

For more than half her 67 years the woman patient at Chicago’s Holy Cross Hospital had enjoyed excellent health, had never needed surgery. Now, as doctors tried to diagnose Mrs. W.’s recent stomach complaint, her husband recalled that 37 years before, while washing dishes, she had been seized with cramps and collapsed on the floor. A physician had called it intestinal flu and put her to bed. For almost two weeks she had been very ill, sometimes in a coma, and had to be forcibly fed, but then she made a fine recovery, raised her one son to manhood.

Holy Cross doctors took X rays which indicated stomach cancer, and incidentally showed a stonelike mass, 6 in. long, in the abdomen. Dr. Edward J. Krol and colleagues decided to remove it. The object, they report in the Illinois Medical Journal, was a lithopedion (stone child), a petrified fetus of three to four months’ gestation. The doctors’ conclusion: what had troubled Mrs. W. 37 years ago was not the flu but an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized ovum had lodged in one of the Fallopian tubes. As the fetus grew, it burst the tube and escaped into the abdominal cavity. This explained the seizure during dishwashing. Gradually the fetus had become completely calcined.

Although lithopedia have been known since 1557, this is only the 259th fully authenticated case. In the case of Mrs. W., her death a year and a half after the operation was caused by cancer, had nothing to do with her stone child.