Cecil says that “Ten fatalities and one near-miss had been reported in the medical literature as of 1983.” I wanted to get an idea about when this was written, so I looked at the article date: 16-Aug-1974. :eek:
Is it true that Cecil was able to time travel into the future to deduce that as of 1983, 10 women would die of embolisms, then went back to 1974 to report this? Or is it something a little more mundane?
My understanding is that old columns are sometimes updated and republished. So that original column was run in 1974, then updated in 1983.
According to my wife, who recently came across this oral sex/embolism ‘fact’ while reading “What to expect when you’re expecting”, the whole thing is a crock.
She checked through PubMed and all the other medical literature (overachieving doctors tend to do this 
), and found one case of a woman who had an embolism while pregnant where oral sex may have been a contributing factor. That’s one case worldwide!