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 Sixth.

The different instruments which the men have invented in aid of, and supplement to the deficiency of nature, and of which they are frequently obliged to make use in different labors, ought not to be put into the hands of midwives: and were it but for this reason alone, they ought to be excluded from the practice of this art. As, why multiply attendants unnecessarily? A man-midwife, with his instruments which he ought always to have about him, is enough for every thing: whereas a midwife, if the case requires instruments, will be obliged to have recourse to a man: consequently double embarrassment, double expence.

ANSWER.

The keen instrumentarians bring an argument they imagine capable of banishing or exterminating all the midwives. The men, they say, enjoy alone the glorious privilege of using instruments, in order, as they pretend, to assist nature. But let them, I intreat of them, answer, whether if the question could be decided by votes, where is the kingdom, where is the nation, where is the town, where, in short, is the person that would prefer iron and steel to a hand of flesh, tender, soft, duly supple, dextrous, and trusting to its own feelings for what it is about: a hand that has no need of recourse to such an extremity as the use of instruments, always blind, dangerous, and especially for ever useless?

What has engaged men to invent and bequeath to their successors so many wonderful productions, for such they imagine them? Is it not the thirst of fame and money? These gentry have judged, that they ought to spare no lucubrations, no labor of the head, no efforts of the tongue and pen to procure themselves a strange reputation, supported by these horrible instruments. But these lucubrations, this labor of the head, would have been much better employed in seeking for the means of absolutely doing without them, as our good female practitioners have ever done, and as those of them still do, who are instructed in the right practice.

We are no longer in the times of the Pharaohs and the Herods, who mercilessly massacred the innocents; we are no longer in the times of those pure Arabs, who were the inventors of a number of cruel operations, and of several instruments, which often cause more apprehension and terror to a woman in labor, though concealed from her light, but never from her imagination, than the actual presence of all the apparatus of the rack, where that torture is in use.

It were to be wished, that all the men-midwives, who had wrote on this matter, had suppressed the mention of their instruments; for as their books often fall into the hands of women, so deeply interested as the sex is in that subject, it is not to be imagined what bad effects they have. Their variations among themselves would be sufficient to frighten the women: you meet with authors condemning in the morning the over-night’s sentiment. I can observe them losing their way in systematical errors, which explain nothing to me, and in which nothing can be discovered but disagreement with one another, and with themselves. The wisest and most able of them, after having well examined all the kinds of instruments hitherto invented, have doubtless seen and been convinced of their ridiculousness and usefulness, but all of them have not hitherto dared to speak out and say as much.

The most interested of them would fain persuade us, that, in their display of a whole armory of instruments, they have discovered the philosopher’s stone of midwifery, in virtue of which they have a right to wrest out of the women’s hands, the practice of an art, which nature has appropriated to them. But certainly the point, and the whole point is, to find an expert dexterous hand, the sex is out of the question, provided it is but a human hand, and provided the work is done to the satisfaction of society, it seems to me that nothing more need be required.