Note 45 — A TREATISE OF MIDWIFERY. Part the Second. (continued 3)

If any of my readers imagine that I have, in my objection to the men-midwives, exagerated matters, I intreat of them to consider the following quotation from a male-practitioner, from Daventer, who endeavoured, as much as Nature would allow him, to be a good midwife, however he fell short of it. These are his own words translated, from p. 11. of the French quarto edition.

“Can any thing be more shocking to the mother, and to those about her, than to see a man in liquor, scarce knowing what he is about, divested of all compassion, of all sentiment of humanity, his hands armed with a knife, a crotchet, a pair of pinchers, or other horrible instruments, come to the ASSISTENCE of a woman in agonies, begin, for his first attestation of skill, by wounding the mother, then go on to destroy the child, bring it away piece-meal, with exquisite tortures to the woman, and, after all, grumble in the notion, that he could not be PAID enough for such a fine spot of work? had not such better at once take on to be butchers or hangmen, than treat thus the image of God, and render the profession odious?”

Have I any where said any thing STRONGER than this? Daventer, however, certainly did not mean by it to insinuate, that all men-midwives answered intirely this description; no, nor I neither. But leaving the brutality out of the question, the mischief and mercenariness of them all differ perhaps in no very considerable degree. Please to remark in the following quotation, the DOCTRINE and practice of that famous man-midwife Peu. “He determines himself, without much ceremony, to the breaking a child’s arm or a thigh, when he imagines this operation will facilitate the delivery, and that, on the PRINCIPLE of its being easy, to repair such damages of new-born infants. For the same reason the luxation of a jaw-bone gives him no scruple.” (Translator of Daventer’s Preface.)