Fashion, it is true, may not only govern people in indifferent matters, such as dress, furniture, equipage, or so forth, but even in essential, even in capital ones, such, for example, as is this point of option between the men-operators and the midwives: it may, in short, exert its tyranny in many things, one would rather think left better to the determination of Reason. But then this tyranny cannot well be long-lived. The evils which such a fashion begets destroy at length their own parent. No opinion then, as I have before observed, can be permanent that is not founded on the truth of Nature: but where the consequences of such an opinion are detrimental to the good of society, which is the darling object of Nature; that spirit of self-preservation which she has so manifestly diffused thro’ human kind, will hardly suffer errors pernicious to it long to subsist. There is no fashion can, under such objections, long hold out against victorious Nature, who is sure to revenge the violences offered her.
And here I even officiously seize on an occasion that rises to me out of the very bowels, I may say, of my subject, of selecting for one proof of the danger of adopting innovations offensive to Nature, a point of such near analogy to midwifery, as that of nursing children, the care of whom, next to that of the mothers, is the true midwife’s tender province.
I wish then that those, who too readily admit that this so recent a fashion of employing men-midwives preferable to female ones, is an improvement receivable on the foot of its supposed advantage to human kind, would consider a little the actual consequences of having flown in the face of Nature with respect to the bringing up young children, in a way scarce more foreign from her dictates, than that of men delivering women. That women are by Nature herself formed for the office of aiding women in their lying-in; that they are also formed to bring up children by the breast, are two parts of their destination by Nature, which in all ages, and in all countries seem to have born little or no controversy. Interest has lately invaded both these provinces. With this difference, that as to the first, that of women supplanted in their business of delivering women, an active interest has prevailed; as in that of denying the female breast to children, it is a purely passive one[[19]]; and we shall soon see what a dreadful effect this sacrifice of Nature to interest has produced.
As to the mischief produced by the other, of the implicitly excluding the women from midwifery, by the power of prejudice and fashion, it is not, as yet, of a Nature for obvious reasons quite so susceptible of proof, though most certainly not the less therefore existent. And that mischief is palpably owing to the gain which the men-midwives find or presume in the exercise of that profession. This is the active interest: that end to which the means give so justly the construction of base and sordid. The rich are the object of this wretched imposition, which will probably last so much the longer, for the interest to be found in imposing upon them.
But for the denying the female breast to children; it has not indeed passed hitherto into a tenet, that children may as well be reared by the spoon as by the breast, because there is not that prospect of the place of a dry-nurse being as lucrative as that of a man-midwife. If it was so, I should not dispair of seeing a great he-fellow florishing a pap-spoon as well as a forceps, or of the public being enlightened by learned tracts and disputations, stuffed full of Greek and Latin technical terms, to prove, that water-gruel or scotch-porridge was a much more healthy aliment for new-born infants than the milk of the female breast, and that is was safer for a man to dandle a baby than for an insignificant woman.
As this unnatural treatment then of children is almost entirely as yet confined to the very poor, that is to say, to new-born babes thrown upon the public CHARITY for their SUSTENANCE, the rearing by the spoon is not yet regularly established as a general doctrine, it is only admitted in Practice! As proper wet-nurses, from the difficulty in procuring them, might be dearer than dry ones; the cheapest method is preferred, and forms a kind of passive interest or saving œconomy.
But what are the consequences of this violation of Nature, in the grudging her peculiarly appointed aliment to these poor little candidates for life? What follows the substituting, for cheapness-sake, such food as is meant to be afforded them, and is perhaps sometimes even not given them? Death. Death with all that cruelty of torture that attends atrophy or inanition. Thus perish these miserable victims to the false opinion, that the course of Nature can be changed with impunity. I have said here false opinion only, because, with all the obduracy of heart that the spirit of interest so notoriously creates, with all the crimes it so often produces, I cannot think, that such an horror, as the murder of so many innocents, can be entirely imputed to interest without ignorance coming in for its share, though interest has doubtless contributed to the so long continuance of it.
If that maxim is not a false one, that he who knowingly suffers an innocent person to perish, and can help it, is actually guilty of murder: and I prefer here the term of guilty to that of accessary; because I am told, that where there is guilt of murder, all are in the eye of equity and law, principals. Ignorance then, of the sure murder of these innocents by their method of treatment, can be the only plea for those to whom the national charity had committed the care of them. I should think too, that even I myself sinned against charity, if I did not believe, that there is none of those trustees of the poor children, that would not shudder at the thought, of himself taking an infant up by the leg and dashing its brains out against the wall. And yet that would be balmy mercy, the dispatch considered, compared to the lingering tortures, in which those poor little creatures must expire, in the common way of parish-nursing. What is certain however is, that Death would scarce more assuredly be the consequence of the child’s brains being at once beat out, than of that impropriety of aliment, which in the mildest construction is owing to an error in opinion or belief, that any aliment could be salutarily substituted to the one dictated by Nature.
I have here mentioned barely impropriety, or sometimes negation of aliment, without allowance for other causes of destruction to those infants, such as cold, bad air, uncleanliness, neglect of due attendence, or deficiency, in short, of requisites, which are not to be expected from the very poorer sort of the people, to whom the rearing of those infants is generally committed. But that omission of mine is neither undesigned nor unfair. I presume I shall have the greatest physicians on my side, in averring, that even new-born babes are endowed with a surprizing hardiness. Their little seemingly so delicate bodies bear cold to a degree scarcely credible, but from the commonness of both observation and practice, that they only thrive the better for immersions in cold water. Cleanliness, a good air, and attendence, have doubtless indeed some share in the well-doing of children of that age: but all together are in no degree of comparison to the importance of bestowing on children their appropriate aliment. The physical disquisitions into the reason of this do not belong to me here: nor are a few instances of infants reared by the spoon any valid justification for breaking the general rule of Nature, assigning to the female breast the nutrition of children: of which too there is this salutary consequence, that in the very act of lactation there is, by Nature, generated such an indearment of the suckled child to the nurse[[20]], as that she who began it perhaps only for hire, finds herself engaged by a growing affection to supply in some measure the place of the mother to the orphan or deserted babe. The rearing by the spoon is so far from inspiring any such dearness, that the innocent infant is considered only as an embarrassment, of which the quicker the riddance, in the death of the brat, so much the better.
The opinion, however, that this one of the greatest institutes of Nature for the preservation of the species, for which she has so admirably organized the female breast, could be dispensed with in favor of a most sordid savingness, has alone caused more human sacrifices, to that black Demon of Interest, than probably were ever made to the “grim idol of” Moloch in the valley of Hinnom, while the cries of the poor children could not be heard by ears closely stopped up in honor of that infernal spirit.