Why did not Pharaoh give the same order to the men-midwives, if there had been any such employed in difficult or extraordinary pains? (as Mr. Smellie supposes.) Or rather, if the king had not thought it too unnatural for women to be delivered by men, he certainly would not have failed to have commanded it, especially on perceiving that the midwives had deceived him. This would have been a fine occasion to have forbidden them their function, and for the men-practitioners to have come into vogue. The men would certainly have been of the two not the improperest to have executed the intentions of the tyrant: as tender-heartedness is surely not more the character of their sex, than of the women. Besides, their instruments would have served admirably to have thinned the species, without distinction of the sexes. They might also have concealed the barbarity of the murders by such instruments, under the pretext of their necessity from hard-labors, as the midwives excused their disobedience under that of easy ones, which had rendered their aid superfluous.
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.