A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery / Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a Midwife

by Elizabeth Nihell

Conclusion of the First Part.

In the foregoing part of this work I have contented myself with asserting, in general, the perfect inutility of those instruments, of which the male-practitioners themselves confess the danger, and use them not a bit the less for that confession. It is then for the following and second part, that I have reserved the entering into a more particular discussion of them. Therein will appear, upon how false and slender a foundation the gentlemen-midwives have insinuated themselves into a business so little made for them. The truth is, that the pernicious quackery of those same instruments has been artfully made the pretext, and become the sanction of an innovation set on foot by Interest, adopted by Credulity, and at length fostered by Fashion. The employing of midwives was undoubtedly not long since, in this country, the General Rule. The calling in of men-practitioners, upon very extraordinary occasions, was an Exception, and a very rare one, to that General Rule. But by a fatal inversion of the natural order of things, the Exception is recently crept into the place of the General Rule. The point is to consider, whether this palpable violence to Nature is of that benefit to society which it is pretended to be.

I have already examined some of the arguments in favor of the men-practitioners. But the principal one, deduced from the incapacity, or rather aversion of the midwives, upon just grounds, from using instruments, merits an ampler scrutiny. In proof of my candor in it, I shall take most of my remarks on those instruments from what the men-practitioners themselves say, and confess of them. This, I presume, cannot be deemed unfair.

Upon the whole, those parties whom the decision may concern, will please to decide on which side the force of Reason and Truth shall appear the greatest; and so deciding, it is, in fact, in their own favor, and in one of their most capital concerns, that they will decide.

They will decide, in short, whether, upon the whole, the plea of the men-practitioners, founded upon the ignorance of a few midwives which, bad as it is, is more than balanced by their incompetency in the manual function, and to which a remedy might easily be found, is a valid one for driving out of the practice of midwifery a sex, to which the faculty of it is self-evidently the genuine gift of Nature herself, only to make way for a set of interested male-practitioners, whose so boasted art is oftenest signalized by the most barbarous and horrid outrages upon Nature, with this aggravation, that they are needlessly committed under the specious and plausible pretext of flying to her assistence.

The End of the First Part.

A
TREATISE
OF
MIDWIFERY.
Part the Second.

Containing various observations on the labor and delivery of lying-in women, including a discussion of the pretended necessity for the employing instruments.