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 Third.

So many authors as have wrote on the art of midwifery, from the age in which Hippocrates florished, whom we look on as the first and father of the men-midwives, with the disciples whom he formed, and their successors, do not they satisfactorily prove the antiquity of man-midwives?

ANSWER.

As for satisfactorily, no. It can only be concluded from this objection, that the ignorance of the pretended men-midwives is very antient: and yet posterior by much to the function of the midwives, since that is coeval with the world itself, embraces all times, extends through all parts of the earth, whereas we hear nothing of the other till the times of Hippocrates.

Nevertheless I greatly respect Hippocrates, and all the authors who have treated of this art. Some thanks are due to them, though but from those whom they have set to work in our days. Consider but the most celebrated authors among them down to our times, there may be found in them great progresses by degrees, especially in our modern writers on this subject. Yet the most intelligent of them feel and confess that the matter is yet far from exhausted. For after having studied all the treatises we have upon it, there may, there must be perceived an aberration and emptiness with which the understanding remains unsatisfied, and feels that much is yet wanting to the requisite perfection.

Notwithstanding likewise the veneration confessedly due to Hippocrates, I cannot dispense myself from saying the truth; he might be and doubtless was an excellent physician: he has wrote upon all the female disorders, and on the means of delivering them; he may have been consulted in his time, but he can never pass for an able man-midwife. His writings contain some violent remedies and strange prescriptions for women in labor, which must be the produce of the most dangerous ignorance of what is proper for them in that condition.

This author was also evidently ignorant of what concerns preternatural deliveries, as indeed were his successors till the beginning of the last century.

To prove what I advance, there needs no recourse back to very remote times: it will be sufficient to peruse the treatises of Ambrose Paræus, Jacques Guillemeau, Peter-Paul Bienassis, printed 1602, and even that of De la Motte, who is of this century, to own, that the practice of the men-midwives was far from having attained any degree of perfection.

The manner in which the antients proceeded, when the child presented in an untoward situation, is a fully convincing proof thereof; since they obstinately, in such cases, continued their efforts to reduce it to its natural situation, in spite of a thousand difficulties and dangers, instead of bringing it away footling, as is now done by all who understand the right practice.

Hippocrates is the first who discovered that wonderful secret of killing the child, and bringing it away piece-meal from the mother’s womb. He advises it, in the manner taken notice of by Dr. Smellie, in his introduction, (page 10. & seq.) I do not know whether it is from that branch of practice that he adopts him for “the father of midwifery” (p. 4.) but, what is certain is, that Galen, and all the successors of Hippocrates, till towards the end of the last century, exactly followed his method of not delivering women in hard labors, but by the means of murderous instruments. I shall not here detain myself with rehearsing the long legend Mr. Smellie gives us of all the authors who have written on this subject to the time of Ambrose Paræus; time when to the progresses made by the midwives of the Hôtel Dieu at Paris in the art of midwifery, it was owing, that the surgeons, guided by their superior lights, made some greater progress towards perfection.

That the reader however may not suspect me of exaggeration, or over-straining points, I request of him to suspend his judgment, to have the patience to hear me out to the end, and he will find, that I have here advanced nothing but what in the sequel stands clearly and manifestly proved.