Note 23 — A TREATISE ON MIDWIFERY. (continued 3)

As the story is told in Hyginus, it should seem that the practice of midwifery at Athens, was, on a season interdicted to the women, who, by a fixt resolution to die rather than submit to be delivered by the men, procured from the Areopagus the repeal of that statute, and the saving from imminent condemnation one Agnodice, who had dressed herself in men’s cloaths, to elude the cognizance of the law. The great practice she had obtained by this means had alarmed the physicians, who thereon accused her as a seducer of the women: against which she easily defended herself by a declaration of her sex. But this brought her under the penalty of the law against women exercising the midwife’s profession. The story imperfectly related in Hyginus, at the same time that it does honor to the modesty of the Athenian women, that is to say, if modesty is not, according to the men-midwives, a false honor, gives room to suspect, that the midwives themselves had perhaps occasioned the promulgation of so absurd a law. It is well known, that in those antient times, there were for female disorders women-physicians in form. Perhaps their encroachments on the province of the men, by exercising the art of physic in general, might make a restraint necessary, which was only so far faulty as that the remedy was in this, as it often is in other cases, carried into extremes. I would no more justify the women overstepping their proper sphere of employment into that of the men, than I would the men sinking into that of women. They are both reprehensible, both dangerous, but assuredly, the last must be the most ridiculous.