A TREATISE OF MIDWIFERY. Part the Second. (continued 3)

Here follows a much more material contradiction, rather however to common sense than to Levret himself, to which I intreat the reader’s particular attention.

Observations, part the 2d, p. 160. Levret gives us the following preliminary general precept.

“There is, says he, a general precept by which it is established, that a surgeon ought never to thrust instruments into deep places, without guiding or 436conducting them with the hand, or with the extremity of the fingers of that hand that does not hold the instrument.”

It is then to this general axiom strongly dictated by reason, and surely in no case more obviously so, than where the exquisitely tender texture of the uterus protests against committing its safety from the cruellest injuries, to the necessarily blind random agency of an iron or steel instrument, so palpably ungovernable in so remote, intricate, and slippery a place by even the most skilful hand^[40]; it is, I say, in exception 437to this so salutary general precept, that Mr. Levret will have it that there are exceptions, and in favor of what, do you think, not surely of the poor woman who, is to be the subject, or rather the victim of the experiment, but of——his most egregiously silly CURVE FORCEPS! Yes; it is by way of trying practices with that same instrument, that the patient is liable to be spread out, in that delicate attitude which I have above, (p. 237) described from Levret, to the perusal of whom, for a thorough conviction of the perfect insignificance of that instrument, or indeed of any of that sort, I would recommend even the most sanguine in favor of instruments, if they would but grant, to their own reason, its just prerogative of a previous suspence of prejudice.

In these cases, however, for the which being exceptions to that excellent general rule, Levret contends; and, to do him justice, contends so auckwardly, that he rather provokes pity than indignation, at his endeavouring to establish even so pernicious an error; let the reader consider within 438himself the part into which this forceps is to be thus blindly thrust, at the risque of so many almost inevitable dangers. And for what?——In those cases it is either possible or not possible to introduce the fingers. Where they absolutely cannot be insinuated, the introduction of those instruments is in all human probability big with the worst of mischiefs, where neither hand nor fingers can controul the effects of the iron or steel: which, consequently, endanger more than they can help, and are therefore not to be used. But if the hand or the fingers can be insinuated, the hand or the fingers well conducted will do the work without the help of instruments, which in this second supposition become also useless.

This brings me to this case particularly, the title of which is prefixed to this section, that of a head stuck in the passage, which the gentlemen-midwives may perhaps second Levret, in maintaining to be an exception to that admirable axiom above quoted, and maintain it purely, in evasion of the conclusion against their miserable instruments, which I aver need never 439be resorted to, nor never are, but for want of sufficient skill in the manual function to terminate such labors without them.

I answer then to these instrumentarians, that an instrument, even, no more dangerous than a probe, would in so tender a place as I am treating of, not perhaps be quite enough exempt from a possibility of doing mischief, to deserve an exception: but as to those instruments, which are so palpably likely to hurt both mother and child, to injure, in short, or even to destroy both the mould and the cast, they are all of them within the case of exception, or rather exclusion. It is then, in knowing what to do, and in the faculty of operating with the hand according to that knowledge, that the art of midwifery principally consists. If instruments are deemed ingenious, the doing without them is surely not less so.

Now as to the case proposed in this section, that of a child’s head stuck in the passage, I aver, that it is not absolutely impossible to terminate this delivery by the hand.

440I am even ready to demonstrate this before any competent judges. I speak by experience. I have hitherto executed with all desirable success this operation without any aid but that of the hand, with a little patience and proper assiduity. I have many and many a time seen it practised at the Hôtel Dieu, and elsewhere. I never in my whole course of practice saw sufficient reason for attempting so hazardous an extraction, as that which is executed by means of a tire-tête. Why then those needless terrors, those superfluous tortures with instruments, to women already in too much pain and anguish? care enough could not be taken to spare those of the weaker-nerved sex in that condition such horrors, the very idea of which, to say no more, is enough to put them into imminent peril of their lives. All the forceps, and the rest of the chirurgical apparatus, especially the more complex instruments, very justly frighten the women, and their friends and assistents for them. Their introduction requires at once a painful, a shocking, and a needless devarication. The patients are 441put into attitudes capable of making them die with apprehension, if not with shame, from that native modesty of theirs, which, in these cases, may however be pronounced rather a wise instinct than a virtue.

How much preferable is the true midwife’s practice, who will have oftenest prevented, by her knowledge and skill, this very situation! That is to say, if she has been called in time. She knows how to predispose the passages, and by gentle reductions to restore Nature to her right road, where she has been through mispractice driven out of it, or through negligence suffered to deviate from it, or not preventively watched.

I have never but seen, with respect to the uterus in this case, that it was possible to insinuate first one finger, then another, and little by little the whole hand, not indeed a hard hand, as big as a shoulder of mutton, the hand of some lusty he-midwife, but of a midwife, such as it is commonly seen.

442When Nature does not proceed as could be wished in her labor-pains, the point is then to husband well the strength of the patient, to restore it where it fails, by giving her good broths and corroboratives, that do not heat, or cooling things, where heating ones have been injudiciously administered. She is then to lie as composed and tranquil as possible; to be cherished, comforted, inheartened. There is, humanly speaking, no fear but her strength will return; her pains must not be irritated, nor herself harrassed with ineffectual interference. Nature will come to herself again: the situation will, by her benign energy, change for the better, and become favorable enough, for the midwife to be able to assist her in the due time with a manual operation, that will terminate happily her delivery. It is at least, with this success, that I have delivered many, who, by the unskilfulness of those who had attended them, at the beginning of their pains, had been reduced to a deplorable condition, by their labor lingering some for upwards of six days.

443In short, it is extremely rare that this case of a head stuck in the passage ever happens, unless under the hands of unskilful practitioners, or of over-dilatory or neglectful midwives, who will not have duly attended to the prognostics of this event; who will not have watched and taken the benefit of the favorable critical moment; who give the head time to engage itself, or get fast jammed, for want of their removing the impediments to Nature’s doing the rest, or when help has been called or come too late. It may also be owing to those who hasten too much, who precipitate the women’s labor by forcing draughts, that heat, burn them up, exhaust their strength, and prematurate the coming on of the labor-pains. Some practitioners fatigue them, with making them walk, or keep them up too much.

But when the membranes are not too soon pierced and the waters let out, when the pains are not provoked, when time is given to Nature to form to herself a passage, not omitting the precautions I have 444summarily intimated; when due care is taken to procure all possible ease of body and mind to the patient; who may vary her posture, sometimes lying along, sometimes sitting up, or well supported when she walks: little by little the head will frank itself a passage with the weight of the body acting by an innate energy, and with a little due assistence of the midwife’s art: and with this practical advertence, that, in these arduous cases, much may be safely left to Nature, but not every thing. There are times in which she cannot bear neglect, but there are none in which she can bear extreme violence.

Here the reader will not expect I should in a treatise, purely calculated to expose the abuses of midwifery, attempt to particularize either all the contingent cases, or all the modes of operation in them. That would require a work a-part. I shall only then, to the four principal cases, in which instruments are so falsely supposed necessary, add a summary account of that of a pendulous belly, which is not without its difficulty.

445As to a PENDULOUS BELLY, madam Justine, midwife to the Electress of Brandenbourg, remarks, in her Treatise of the Art, that she knows, by experience, that some children turn upon their heads with their feet upwards, in women who have a large and prominent abdomen; because, says she, they are pitched too much into the fore-part of the belly, that is become pendulous. But she does not explain the consequence of this situation, which however does not fail of causing a severe and troublesome labor; in that the uterus being fallen into the capacity of the hypogastrium, and the child being got above the os pubis, there it sticks, and the labor-pains are ineffectual, if proper assistence is not given to Nature.

The practice which my success on experience encourages me to propose is, to have the patient lye on her back, the belly to be braced upwards with a large linnen-fold or roller, to reduce the uterus and fœtus to its better position in the capacity of the pelvis; but if, notwithstanding that 446help, the head of the child continues to rest on the os pubis, the finger must be insinuated between those bones and the head, in order to make, it, little by little, retrograde into the pelvis towards the coccyx.

In every case then that can be imagined, so far as my own experience and observation have reached, I am authorized to aver, that the gentleness of the manual assistence to women is at once more agreeable to Nature, and more salutary than the violence of the instrumental practice; which not only conveys the idea, but the very reality of a butchery. While its being sheltered under the plausible pretext of tenderness and pious regard to the safety of the poor women and children, cannot but provoke the greater indignation, at seeing vile interest trifling thus wantonly with their lives, and add to the cruel outrages on the human person, the greatest of insults on the human understanding.

It cannot however have escaped observation, that while I am, with the utmost regard to truth, endeavouring to recommend 447the preference of the hands to instruments, there is nothing I mean so little, as that some deliveries may not be accomplished by instruments, and especially by that divine invention of the forceps. What I presume to exclaim against, is the needless torture to the mother, the needless increase of danger to which she and her child both are exposed, for the sake of that practice being tried upon them, with those instruments, when the bare hands would be so much more safe and effectual. I could myself, no doubt, in many cases, if I could be inhuman and wicked enough to dally with any thing so sacred as the health or life of a woman and child, in some measure, entrusted to me, give myself the learned air of delivering with a CURVE FORCEPS. But in the very same cases, though at the hazard of being called ignorant for my pains, I would always be sure to do it more cleverly, less dangerously, less hurtfully, with only my hands. So that, without straining any comparison, the forceps may deliver indeed, but how? Why just as a man may, if he chuses it, hobble round St. James’s Park, on a pair of those artificial 448legs^[41] called stilts, when one would imagine, that the mock-elevation from them could scarce atone for their uncouth totteringness, and that he might full as well deign to use his own natural legs.

In the slighter cases then, that is to say, in those cases, where it is a jest to doubt of the hands not being the preferable instrument, since they may be truly averred to be so even in the most difficult ones, instrumentarians commonly go to work, only (please to mind that only) with the forceps. So that it is only in those slighter cases, where, once more nothing is more certain than that no instrument is wanted at all, that they find matter of triumph over their predecessors in theory and practice, over common sense, and especially over humanity. And this is that amazing, that FORTUNATE IMPROVEMENT, the superhuman invention of the forceps, the philosopher’s stone of the modern art of midwifery, 449found out by the male-practitioners. Yet, after all it plainly appears, that even themselves do not rely on it in the more difficult cases. They are then obliged to return to the old crotchet, or the like methods, which bad, very bad, and very inferior to the hands as they are, never however are supposed to be resorted to, without an appearance of extremities to afford some color, some plea of humanity to employ them, in a kind of dernier resort, to prevent a greater evil by a less one. Whereas, when the forceps is used, the cruelty of that torture it cannot but create, must be greatly aggravated by the consideration of its being perfectly needless. But in the case of using either crotchet or forceps, or indeed any instruments at all, the truth is, that besides the increase of danger and pain they bring, to the already too much afflicted patients, they defraud them of the more efficacious, less painful, and especially more safe help of the hands alone.

The instrumentarians all then agree on that insufficiency of this precious forceps, which occasionally compels their recourse 450to the crotchet so detested even by themselves. Levret, for example, confesses this, p. 24, of the appendix to his observations.

“The crotchets (says he) are, generally speaking, instruments, the very sight of which shocks and terrifies: but notwithstanding the repugnance which all good men-midwives ought to have to the using of them, there are cases in which there is no doing without them.”

Now in these cases, that of the monster with two heads^[42], is not meant to be included, as Levret himself afterwards explains himself. If then there are such cases as necessitate a recourse to crotchets, it will, I presume, be allowed me, that they can be no other than those which render the delivery the most laborious. What those cases are, I have, from after the instrumentarians 451themselves reduced to the four capital ones, I have above set forth, without reckoning the pendulous belly. At least I know of no other situations than those, that can produce the very severe labors, nor do I believe that the instrumentarians know any other, or they would tell us so. Now if, in the more difficult of those cases, there is no doing without the crotchet, what becomes of the prodigious merit of the forceps, so insignificant in cases of the greatest need, and so superfluous in those others, where there being no occasion at all for it, it must be the most inhuman wantonness to employ it?

Here can you be with too much insistence desired to observe the solemn banter, in such a matter of life and death too, of these kind, tender-hearted modern instrumentarians! they are so transported with stark love and compassion to the poor women and children, that they do not know what they are about; they fall into the most palpable contradictions, and would have even Hippocrates, and the antients, appear as so many bloody-minded Cannibals 452compared to them. Hippocrates, it seems, and the antients, according to the best of their apprehension, in points of midwifery, prescribed the crotchet, in no case however but where the child was certainly dead, which, by the by, is next to the not prescribing it at all, since the ascertainment of that death is scarce not impossible. So because they recommended this practice in the last necessity, the ingeniousness of the modern instrumentarians was “^[43]stimulated to contrive some gentler method of bringing along the head” —— without any necessity at all; that is to say, in the minor difficulties, for the crotchet of the old practice is, to this instant, even with them, left in possession of the greater ones. Thus was produced the forceps, that prodigiously bright refinement upon the dull antients, and goes on improving without end under the wise heads of our gentlemen-midwives. But if the modern Genius of arts and sciences has no better improvement than this to boast over Hippocrates and the antients, may the instinct 453of self-preservation defend mothers, and, in them, their children, from being the trophy-posts of their victorious atchievements! may the midwives continue in their happy ignorance of their curious devices! may they ever preserve a due aversion from indeed all instruments whatever! for they are all needless and pernicious substitutes to the hands. May none of them, especially in any labors committed to their conduct, prove so criminally false to their sacred trust, as through negligence, or through an interested designing reliance upon instruments, to repair their failures or mispractice, slacken their attention to their duty, or afford, by their defective performance, an excuse, though a fallacious one, for resorting to instruments, when skilful hands are incomparably more fit for a remedy or retrieval!

I cannot then too ardently wish, for the women not to be so cruel to themselves, and to their so naturally dear children within them, as inconsistently to suffer their aim at superior safety, to be the very snare that betrays them into the greater 454danger, and often worst of consequences, from those male-practitioners, to whom that aim drives them for recourse; while that examination they owe to so interesting a point would issue, or deserve to issue, in rescuing them from such a shameful subjection of body and spirit to a band of mercenaries, who palm themselves upon them, under cover of their crotchets, knives, scissors, spoons, pinchers, fillets, terebra occulta, speculum matricis, all which, and especially their tire-têtes, or forceps, whether Flemish, Dutch, Irish, French or English, bare or covered, long or short, strait or crooked, flat or rounding, windowed or not windowed, are totally useless, or rather worse than good for nothing, being never but dangerous, and often destructive.

Nature, if her expulsive efforts are but, in due time, and when requisite, gently and skilfully seconded by the hands alone, will do more, and with less pain than all the art of the instrumentarians, with their whole armory of deadly weapons. The original and best instrument, as well as the antientest, is the natural hand. As 455yet no human invention comes near it, much less excells it: and in that part it is that the women have incomparably and evidently the advantage over the men for the operations of midwifery, in which dexterity is ever so much more efficacious than downright strength.

And, indeed, let every requisite faculty for the assistence of lying-in women be well considered, and the resulting determination cannot but be, that in the common labors, where the men themselves are either simple by-standers or receivers of the child, or operate with the hand only, they are the very best of them, not comparable to a common midwife, and in those cases, in which they pretend the use of instruments necessary, hardly better than the worst one. So that, not less than justly speaking, they are not receivable, either as substitutes, or even as supplements to midwives.

The art of midwifery then, in its management by women, carries with it, in the recommendation of order, modesty, propriety, ease, diminution of pain and danger, all 456the marks of the providential care of Nature. It is imaged by the incubation of a brood-hen, assiduously watching over her charge, and tenderly hatching it with her genial heat. Whereas the function of this art, officiated by men, has ever something barbarously uncouth, indecent, mean, nauseous, shockingly unmanly and out of character: and, above all, of lame or imperfect in it. It strongly suggests the idea of the chicken-ovens in Egypt, kept by a particular set of people, who make a livelihood of the secret, which they, it seems, ingross of that curious art of hatching of eggs by a forced artificial heat: a practice, which, like the other refinements of dungbeds for the same purpose, or that of committing the rearing or education of the chickens to^[44]“cocks, to capons, or to artificial wooden mothers,” may sound indeed vastly ingenious; but besides the numbers that perish the victims of those experiments, many of the productions of such methods of hatching are observed to be maimed, wanting a leg or a wing, or 457some way damaged or defective. The comparison breaks indeed in that, at least, the grown hens themselves escape damage, which is not often the case of mothers under those heteroclite beings the men-midwives; or, if they do escape, it is no thanks to those operators, but to the prevalence of Nature over their pragmatical intervention, so fit only to disturb, thwart, or oppose her effects, and in every sense to deprive the unhappy women that trust them of her common benefit.

But while superior considerations of humanity so justly intercede for the mothers, while I strenuously contend for the preference to be, without hesitation, due to the mother over the child, especially in that dreadful dilemma, where one must be sacrificed to the safety of the other; supposing such a dreadful alternative ever to exist, which I much doubt, or at least, not to exist so often as it is rashly taken for granted, and even then, where the effects do not always follow the resolution taken thereon, since, though the child is always certainly lost, the mother is far from 458always saved, when, by a judicious preventiveness in practice, neither of them might perhaps have been so much as in jeopardy; while, I say, I plead for the preferable attention to the mothers, I hope no mothers will think me the worse intentioned towards them, for giving the lives of their children the second place in my tender concern for the safety of both.

And surely never was a time, when children more required the intercession of humanity in their favor. Mothers can speak for themselves. But the poor infants, so often precluded, by violence, from the pity-moving faculty of their own cry, have nothing but the cry of Nature to plead for them. A cry, the listening to which is prevented by those vain imaginary terrors, inspired by designing Art in the service of Interest, through which Nature is seduced to act against herself, and deliver herself up to her greatest enemies.

In short, one would imagine, that all the rage of cruelty was unchained, and let loose against especially those tender innocents, born or unborn.

459Among the poor, particularly as to those infants cast upon the public charity, a barbarously premature ablactation, under a pretext so easily foreknown to be as false as it is fatal, of bringing them up by hand for cheapness-sake, has destroyed incredible numbers.

Among the rich, or those able enough to pay for the learned murder of their offspring, how many of their children, even before they have well got hold of life, in this, literally speaking as to them, iron age, encounter their death or wounds, stuck in the brain by a crotchet, or crushed by a forceps, to say nothing of their being now and then ingeniously strangled in the noose of a fillet!

And those horrors proceed unchecked and unexploded, and in what a nation? a nation, that values herself upon the distinction of profound thinking: a nation that, besides that interest she has in common with all other well-governed nations, to protect and promote population, stands, 460be it said, in that true spirit of justice, which as much disdains to pay a fulsome compliment, as good sense ever will to receive it, moreover eminently distinguished above them all, for producing a race of natives, one would think could hardly be too numerous, since they are the most remarkable in the known world for courage, for personal beauty, and for many other liberal gifts of Nature, among which surely not the least is, that inborn spirit of liberty, to which they owe the honorable acquisition of so many additional advantages.

Can it then be too strongly recommended to the women especially, at least, to examine whether their notion of superior safety under the hands of a man, in their lying-in, bears upon the solid foundation of Nature, or merely on the treacherously weak one of a delusive opinion? an opinion that owes its existence to fears cruelly played upon, and turned to account by designing Interest. If those then of them who are under the force of prejudice, or governed by habit, or by both at once, would, on a point that concerns themselves and children so 461nearly, assume liberty enough of mind to shake off the dangerous yoke, they would undoubtedly find it better and safer to listen to that salutary instinct of Nature so authorized by reason, which inspires them with that repugnance to submit themselves in the manner they must do that submit themselves to men-midwives, who have the impudence to call that repugnance a “false modesty:” as if that Modesty could not be a true one, a foolish one I am sure it could not be, that should murmur at being so cruelly sacrificed to such a bubble’s bargain as it is, by those innocents, who, over-persuaded by a deceitful promise of more effectual aid, too often embrace a torturous and a shameful death, for which, to add ridicule to horror, they are expected to pay their executioners larger fees than to one of their own sex for a more decent, a more safe, and always a less painful delivery.

May the women then, for their own sakes, for the sake of their children, cease to be the dupes, sure as they are to be in some measure the victims of that scientific 462jargon, employed to throw its learned dust in their eyes, and to blind them to their danger or perdition! may they, in short, see through that cloud of hard words used by pedants, whose interest it is to impose themselves upon them: a cloud, which is oftener the cover-shame of ignorance, than the vehicle of true knowledge, and perhaps oftener yet the mask of mercenary quackery, than a proof of medical ability!

As to the writings of the men-midwives especially, I dare aver, that, though there may be here and there some very just theoretic notions, borrowed from able physicians and surgeons, nothing is more contemptible than most of their practical rules; what is tolerable in them being most probably got from midwives, but so disfigured with their own absurd sophistications, that I should heartily pity any woman, subjected to have her labor governed by such, as should have no better guidance than their ridiculous instructions.

Then it is that a sensible woman would, in defence of her own life, or of any life 463that she holds dear to her, in the case of needing the aid of midwifery, view with equal disdain, with equal horror, either the rough manly^[45] he-midwife, that in 464the midst of his boisterous operation, in a mistimed barbarous attempt at waggery or wit, will ask a woman, in a hoarse voice, “if she has a mind to be rid of her burthen,” or the pretty lady-like gentleman-midwife, that with a quaint formal air, and a gratious smirk, primming up his mouth, in a soft fluted tone, assures her, and lies all the while like a tooth-drawer, that his instruments will neither hurt nor mark herself nor child but a little, or perhaps not at all. (See p. 448.)

This last character, if less brutal than the other, is not perhaps the least dangerous, since the practice being at bottom the same, pregnant consequently with the 465same mischief, the gentleness of the insinuation gives the less warning, and paves the way for the admission of a handling not the less rough for the smoothness of the address. But is there any such thing as polite murder? is mischief the less mischief for being perpetrated with an air of kindness? well considered it is but the more provoking. The male-practitioners then are not quite in the wrong, to presume as they do upon the weakness of the women’s understanding, since they can so grossly pass upon them their needless cruelties, under so inconsistent and false a color as that of a tender compassion. Thus to all the rest of the shame to which they put them, they add that of so palpable an imposition in that flimsy cover of the mean interest, which is so probably the real motive at bottom of their taking up a function, to which they were never called by Nature, nor by any necessity, unless, perhaps, of their own.

In the mean time, the truth is, that, in vain, would the men, by way of sparing the women the terror of their masculine figure, upon those delicate occasions 466of officiating, and to appear the more natural in the business, aim at an occasional effemination of their dress, manner and air. They can never in essentials atone for their interested intrusion into an office, so clearly a female one, that, if but only as to the manual discharge of it, not even the qualifying them for the opera, would, perhaps, sufficiently emasculate them.

Conclusion of the Second and Last Part.

Here, confessing my just apprehensions of not having fulfilled the promise of my title-page; there will not, I hope, to that reproach of my deficient powers in the performance, be added the undeserved ones of vanity or injustice in the design or conduct of my feeble essay.

For as to vanity, or any presumption, on my part, of any thing so weak, so unauthoritative as my representation, having any chance to remove the abuses, not however the less existent for that incapacity of mine to remove them, my knowledge 467of the world would alone defend me from so ridiculously wild a thought. I am but too well aware of the tenaciousness of especially false prejudice in most minds, where it has once gained entrance, and with whom prepossession is ever eleven points of the right. I have then purely had in view the discharge of that duty, incumbent on every member of human society, to oppose such errors as appear to be pernicious to the good of it. In that light I have beheld the growing practice of the instrumentarians, and in that sincere belief I have hazarded the publication of my sentiments, without surely pretending to any authority over the opinion of others. That I chearfully leave to every one’s reason, who is capable of reason. And to write for others than the rational, would be only labor deservedly lost.

As to injustice, I am, at least, clear of that of partiality to my own sex. I grant and lament as much as any one the incompetency of but too many of the midwives. The number of such cannot be too little. But then would the banishing them out of the practice be preferable to the having 468them better taught, especially since there is nothing but what is so much worse to put in their room, men and instruments? What occasion too for such a dangerous extremity? For as the deficiency is evident, so are the causes: which are not only the want of sufficient care in the training and education of women to this profession, but the actual discouragement, which must grow every day greater and greater, by the encroachments of the instrumentarians, whose plea for supplanting them will be consequently strengthened by that alarming scarcity of capable midwives, which themselves will have so much contributed to create. These being then the principal causes, and well known to be so, the remedies are not obscure, nor hard to attain.

A good education especially is of great importance, to accomplish what Nature has already gone so great a way in, by her giving in many respects to the women such a superior aptitude for the business. Capable midwives would much help to form good female pupils; and the lying-in hospitals especially might be made highly useful 469to so desirable an end. But surely as to the practical part of midwifery in these hospitals, it ought not to be under the direction of men, whose interest it should be, only to form the women so deficiently, as that themselves might be the less unnecessary; to form them, in short, more for their own service, than for that of the public. That temptation being removed, the female-practitioners could not receive too respectfully from the surgeons lectures or instructions, any lights in anatomy relative to their theoretic proficiency. But to nothing should they be more constantly and effectually excited, than to perfect themselves in the manual operation; and indeed, in general, so to capacitate themselves for their function, as to prove and establish the perfect inutility of all instruments whatever. Nor will it be a difficult task for a woman to acquire a superiority in her hands to the most boasted of those unnatural substitutes. This is the true way of laudably disarming the instrumentarians, and of thereby depriving them of the only shadow of a pretence they have for supplanting the women, and invading the female province, of which invasion it is so probable, that 470not the cause they plead, but the pay they squint at, is the real motive.

As to the discouragement of proper women from applying themselves to the profession, it can only cease by the concurring of those, on whom the choice out of either sex occasionally depends, to restore things to their antient channel: and that will in course, for their own sakes, follow on their ceasing to be imposed upon by the false pretences of the men-practitioners. But this is a point upon which I am too much a party to be heard, though even as no more than an advocate, and much less as a judge. All I shall then presume to say is, that I very readily leave the decision of the question to Reason, that inward oracle in every one’s breast; an oracle, which, in a cause so interesting to human Nature, can never return a false answer, where consulted by those who deserve to find the truth by sincerely seeking it, with a firm design to sacrifice to it the poor vanity of defending a prejudice, or any other interest of the passions. And surely there can hardly exist a point of more capital importance 471to Society, than the determining, what however one would imagine not very difficult to determine, on which side in this profession of midwifery particularly, the superiority of auxiliary power may be expected, on that, where there is evidently a great deal of Nature, assisted with a little but a competency of Art, or on that, where what there is of Art is most barbarously abused, and without any Nature at all.

The END.