In this month and the next, be sure to keep from bleeding; for though it may be safe and proper at other times, yet it will not be so at the end of the fourth month; and yet if blood abound, or some incidental disease happens which requires evacuation, you may use a cupping glass, with scarification, and a little blood may be drawn from the shoulders and arms, especially if she has been accustomed to bleed.  Let her also take care of lacing herself too straitly, but give herself more liberty than she used to do; for inclosing her belly in too strait a mould, she hinders the infant from taking its free growth, and often makes it come before its time.

Rules for the Fourth Month.

In this month also you ought to keep the child-bearing woman from bleeding, unless in extraordinary cases, but when the month is passed, blood-letting and physic may be permitted, if it be gentle and mild, and perhaps it may be necessary to prevent abortion.  In this month she may purge, in an acute disease, but purging may only be used from the beginning of this month to the end of the sixth; but let her take care that in purging she use no vehement medicine, nor any bitter, as aloes, which is disagreeable and hurtful to the child, and opens the mouth of the vessels; neither let her use coloquintida, scammony nor turbith; she may use cassia, manna, rhubarb, agaric and senna but dyacidodium purgans is best, with a little of the electuary of the juice of roses.

Rules for the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Months.

In these months, child-bearing women are troubled with coughs, colds, heart-beating, fainting, watching, pains in the loins and hips, and bleeding.  The cough is from a sharp vapour that comes to the jaws and rough artery from the terms, or the thin part of that blood got less into the reins of the breast; this endangers abortion, and strength fails from watching:  therefore, purge the humours that come to the breast, with rhubarb and agaric, and strengthen the head as in a catarrh, and give sweet lenitives as in a cough.  Palpitation and faintness arises from vapours that go to it by the arteries, or from blood that abounds and cannot get out of the womb, but ascends and oppresses the heart; and in this case cordials should be used both inwardly and outwardly.  Watching, is from sharp dry vapours that trouble the animal spirits, and in this case use frictions, and let the woman wash her feet at bed-time, and let her take syrup of poppies, dried roses, emulsions of sweet almonds, and white poppy seed.  If she be troubled with pains in her loins and hips, as in those months she is subject to be, from the weight of her child as it grows big and heavy, and so stretches the ligaments of the womb and part adjacent, let her hold it up with swathing bands about her neck.  About this time also the woman often happens to have a flux of blood, either at the nose, womb or haemorrhoids, from plenty of blood, or from the weakness of the child