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

But this can be no wonder to those who know there is such an expression, even proverbially in use, as that of children being a BURTHEN to the parish. An expression of which it is hard to pronounce whether it is more execrable or more silly. But what is so inconsequential as the spirit, or rather the no-spirit of interest? Children may indeed be a burthen to private families; and yet for the sweetness of it, how chearfully is it oftenest born, or with very few extraordinary exceptions to the general rule? But to a nation, or what is the same thing, to the lawful representative of the nation, a parish, what can be on earth a falser light to view children in, than that of a burthen? What could be so intolerable in the sum to be added to that actually paid for their being worse than murdered out of hand, to save their little lives, and bring them up to that age, in which the national wisdom should have established for them, at once, the means of earning their likelihood, and of earning it with such beneficial retribution to their truly mother-country, as should amply reward her for her not having neglected the duties of humanity towards them? All the good, all the sensible part of mankind allow, that the true riches of a state, are in the numerousness of it subjects. Trade, arts, the navy, the militia, our colonies all open inexhaustible channels of employment and maintenance. And yet there are who can call children, those children too of the public, not in a ludicrous, but in the dearest tenderest sense, since in the public they ought to find that office of a parent, of which the guilt, the inability, the want of nature in their natural relations, or their death may have defrauded them; there are, I say, who can call such children a burthen! We complain of the defect of population, and yet have seen interest creative of obduracy, and perpetuating ignorance and error, manifestly thinning the species, by nipping those tender blossoms of human kind.

Here, if this notice of the treatment of children should even appear a digression, I should, in favor of the intention, hope forgiveness from a humane reader. He would scarce impute it to me as matter for criticism, the having sacrificed propriety to the introduction of a point so important to humanity. But the truth is, that neither as a digression, nor as a false or over-strained argument, nor as a misapplication, can the same well be considered, by any who will withal consider its strict affinity in so many points to the subject of which I am treating.

It will readily appear, that both these violences offered to Nature in the substituting the men-midwives to the females, and dry-nurses to wet-ones, acknowledge exactly the same common parent, interest, and have exactly the same common effect, the destruction of infants. Is it then possible to be too much on one’s guard against those so flagrant impositions, which are the offspring of that proof-hardened passion? Is any thing sacred from it, since the lives of innocents palpably have not been so, in one branch of practice, nor very presumably are one jot more respected in the other? It is true indeed, that the practice of employing dry-nurses has not yet ascended much among the great and rich; first, because fashions rarely do ascend from the lower classes of life, and next, because there is no such temptation of actual lucre to defend or spread it: but as to that of preferring men-midwives, nothing is so likely as its descending, as it is so much the nature of fashion to descend, and none are more readily adopted by the lower ranks of people from the higher ones, than those fashions which are the most foolish and the most pernicious. And certainly this is not the one that the least deserves those epithets.

Was it not for this influence of the fashion, in making the most unreasonable as well as the most dangerous things pass into practice from the highest down to the lowest life, many an honest man might escape the bad consequences of his following the example of those, than whom none are so liable to be imposed on in such matters, the great and the opulent. These make it worth the while of interested persons to deceive them, and thus often for being cheated, pay with their money, their health, and even with their lives. In the mean time, many who are seduced by the vogue in which they see the men-midwives, employ them on a principle which cannot be enough commended, their natural affection to their wives and children. The reasoning which occurs to a husband in middling or low life on this occasion is probably as follows. “My wife and child are full as dear to me as those of the greatest man in the kingdom are to him, and shall I grudge a little more expence in the provision for their greater safety?” So far he reasons right: all his mistake lies in taking too readily for granted, that same greater safety, to be on the side of the men-practitioners in preference to the midwives, because the former are employed by the great, who, by the by, consult Nature the least of any class of life, even in points of their own health. And certainly in many respects to that sine-quo-non of human happiness, the great had better follow the example even of the poor, than the poor theirs. Make the most then of your reasoning from the prevalence of fashion, the gout and the men-midwives, well considered, are no very enviable appendixes of high-life.

If in some that laudable tenderness for mother and child, is the determining consideration for employing a man-midwife by whom Nature, if consulted, would assure all concerned, that the safety of both was more likely to be endangered than not, there are others again, in whom calling in the aid of a man-midwife is rather matter of luxury, of parade or ostentation, than of opinion of superior safety. These are of that imitative kind of beings, with whom the preference of a man-practitioner for the conducting of his wife’s lying-in, turns upon no other motive, than what would equally make them bestow a silk gown of a new fashion, or a laced-head upon her; from a spirit of emulation of some neighbour or superior.

But what is more surprizing yet, is that notwithstanding the kind of loathing and repugnance with which Nature inspires the women to receive such an office from a man, as that of delivering them, a repugnance to which they had so much better listen, since it has all the characters of a salutary instinct; there are women so weak, as not only not to represent to their husbands the expedience of examining, at least, the propriety of such a fashion, before they blindly adopt it on the faith either of others liable to be deceived, or of those interested in the deceiving them; but who even, in a ridiculous complaisance to that fashion, of which themselves and children are not unlikely to be the victims, will make a point of being attended by a man-midwife, by way of a piece of state.

I have myself known women so infected by this silly vanity, that on receiving visits from their friends after lying-in, and being delivered by a woman, with the utmost safety and satisfaction to them, have been ashamed of having had the better sense and regard for themselves, to employ a midwife in defiance of the fashion, and have told their friends, that it is true Mrs. —— had lain them, but that there was a Doctor at hand in the next room. This by the by was false, for such a Led-Doctor is neither needed nor employed, where a midwife that knows her business is called. If any occasion for medical or even chirurgical skill arises from the complication of a case, there is always time to have the advice of a regular physician, or a regular surgeon, because that complication can never escape timely notice. It can only then be, for the sake of his iron and steel instruments, that a man-midwife has so much as the pretext of being necessary, and I hope to prove, that all the needful can be much better done without them. Yes, I repeat it, better done without them.

For here and throughout the reader will please to observe, that it is on the superiority of safety in employing midwives that I impugn the growing fashion of a recourse to men-practitioners. It is the side of Nature I take against a set of mean mercenaries, who commit the cruellest outrages upon her, under the falsest of all pretences in them, that of assisting her. I would not be so criminal as to wish the benefit of a false argument, in a point of life and death to those mothers and children, my tender care, even could I be silly enough to imagine, that I could pass such an one upon my reader. I wave therefore all plea of the novelty of this upstart profession of men-midwives. Such a plea I readily confess is not receivable. Were It so, how many valuable discoveries or improvements must have been stifled in their birth, if the objection to their being novelties was a valid one? All that I would contend for is, that an innovation should not be admitted only because it is an innovation; and that the decision of a matter of such capital importance, is better left to Reason, always herself submissive to Nature, than abandoned to Fashion, which so often acknowledges no other jurisdiction than that of whim or humor.

There is no prescription for error, no sanction in custom against improvements. But certainly in such a capital point as the life of so many human creatures, in short, in one of the most sacred objects of government, that of population, such a novelty as that of bringing men-midwives into general practice, requires rather a greater authority than that of Fashion, while there is such a standard of essay as Reason.

Inoculation was not long since a novelty in this nation. The lady who introduced it, for any thing I know to the contrary, still lives to enjoy the honor of having procured so great a benefit to mankind. But then this benefit would bear the fairest of all trials, that of calculation: for what is reason itself but another word for calculation? The procuring then the small-pox by inoculation, in a body duly prepared, and especially at an eligible age, affords, according to the doctrine of chances, so much a fairer prospect of safety, than in the case of a spontaneous or accidental infection, that nothing scarcely could be imagined more friendly to Nature than such a rational prevention of her danger, from a distemper too rarely escaped, for the possibility of that escape to be employed as an argument against such a method of prevention. Here then the seeming violence offered to Nature, appeals for its justification to Nature, Reason and Experience.