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

Objection the Eighth.

But you who come so late (it will be said) What new discoveries do you bring us? Can you imagine you will, with one dash of the pen, cancel the impression of so many excellent works as have appeared before you? Do you believe a woman can have more ability than so many men of letters, who have labored all their life-time in perfecting the art, and who so strongly recommend the use of instruments, as the most expeditious method of extricating one self, in all the cases they specify, and where there is a necessity for recourse to extremities? Can you think, that these personages have all spent their time in vain?

ANSWER.

Almost all the sciences and arts attain to perfection, in process of time, through the experience and assiduous attention of those who cultivate them. We owe the most of our rare and precious inventions to the ages of barbarism, in which as yet reigned that brutality and ignorance which the irruption of the northern swarms had diffused over all Europe. This invention and perfection of arts cannot be attributed to merely human industry; but, with more probability, to a particular over-ruling providence, which commonly concealing itself under what seems to us the weakest, and under occurrences which appear to us the effect of chance, have guided men to wonderful discoveries. Do not we owe to a fair Circassian the art of inoculating children? And surely the art of midwifery, perhaps more than any other, stands the fairest chance of being improved by women.

For my part, I dare maintain it, that the surgeons, in form of men-midwives, have been the death of more children, with their speculum matricis, their crotchets, their extractors or forceps, their tire-têtes, &c. than they have preserved. If in killing the children, they have saved the lives of some mothers, they have hurt and damaged, not to say murdered, a number of others. Their faults ought to set us upon searching out for a better way of going to work; a more easy, a more safe one. This fatal operation by instruments might even be pronounced absolutely useless in the profession. There is no inveighing severely enough against so dangerous a doctrine as that which recommends them. Even common humanity requires an endeavour to open the eyes of those, who imagine they cannot do better than blindly to assent, in every point, to authors recommendable, it is true, by a number of good things, but whose authenticity in those points procures them but the more dangerously credit in erroneous ones. Good sense does not dictate undistinguishingly receiving all that is advanced even by the best authors. As they may have been themselves deceived, they may also deceive us. The sacrifice of our reason is what we owe to nothing but to revelation. Books written by men have no title to it. As their understanding is not above the impositions of others, or errors of their own, they may adopt falsities, through ignorance, through prejudice, for want of examination, or of right reasoning. Their heart may also have been byassed or corrupted by views of interest or of ambition. I may therefore, without over-presumption aver, that with regard to instruments, it is wrong to lay any stress on the authority of others. For, with all the respect due to some illustrious writers in these modern times, who defend the party opposed to ours, it may be assuredly said, that either they have not known the art of midwifery, or that they have formed their judgment of it by nothing but the abuses of the antients, who practiced it without knowing it. Is it not a crying shame, that operators, who in their life-time massacred such numbers of human creatures, should still retain, after death, credit enough to assassinate common sense? Faith is given to unskilful authors, who have deceived their cotemporaries, posterity, and perhaps themselves: ignorance admires, enthusiasm protects them. But what a cruel and mean policy must be that of supposing, that the knowledge of truth ought not to have a clearer title to dominion than the illusions of imposture? I hope however, that, when the eyes of the public shall, in this point, come to be opened, and opened they will be, if true physicians will give themselves the trouble to enlighten it, that public will at length see, that an approbation, unpreceded by a due examination, does it as little honor as service.

Lying-in women principally require an early assistence. For unless they are pregnant of a monster with two heads (a case so rare, that in the practice of a thousand surgeons, in their whole life, it may not twice, nor perhaps once fall in their way) there need never be an occasion of recourse to a surgeon: for in this case, of a monster, it must be the affair of a most profoundly skilled operator and not of merely a common man-midwife.

Run over all the authors who have written on this matter, and you will find that the men-midwives, for want of right, and of true knowledge of the profession, have introduced themselves by force and violence, as one may say, sword in hand, with those murderous instruments: read the ancients, it will appear, that they cut their way in, with iron and steel, forerunners of murders. Our moderns to palliate these violences and injustices, agree on one hand, that the common and gentlest methods are to be preferred: but, on the other hand, when you tell them, that the common and gentlest methods are the hands of women, who ought therefore to be preferred to the men, and to be restored to their antient and rightful possession; then you will see the whole pack open in full cry: to arms! to arms! is the word: and what are those arms by which they maintain themselves, but those instruments, those weapons of death! would not one imagine, that the art of midwifery was an art-military?

As for we women, we can but in our weakness groan under this tyranny. Our protest, joined to that of reason and experience, avails little. Our wise innovators have a great deal more wit than we have; but it is not a wit of which we would be ambitious: for it serves them no better, than under the pretence of saving to be paid for destroying: at least it is not unfrequently so.