Fifteen years later, and on a different continent, Steiner and
Luschbaugh published their case series of eight maternal deaths
in the United States (Chicago, Illinois). They also found abundant
fetal material in the maternal pulmonary vasculature. In their
series, three of the women entered labor with dead fetuses and
one of these cases echoed the JR Meyer’s case, as she also had
sepsis. Similarly, in one of the patients, Steiner and Luschbaugh
found ‘‘amniotic fluid emboli’’ both within the lungs and in the
uterine veins. What is often over-looked in the subsequent literature
is that these pathologists did acquire a control group of 34parturients dying in the third trimester of other causes. They did
not find any fetal material in the lungs of anyone without AFE
with the one exception of finding a small amount of mucin in the
pulmonary vasculature of a single patient.