They will decide, in short, whether, upon the whole, the plea of the men-practitioners, founded upon the ignorance of a few midwives which, bad as it is, is more than balanced by their incompetency in the manual function, and to which a remedy might easily be found, is a valid one for driving out of the practice of midwifery a sex, to which the faculty of it is self-evidently the genuine gift of Nature herself, only to make way for a set of interested male-practitioners, whose so boasted art is oftenest signalized by the most barbarous and horrid outrages upon Nature, with this aggravation, that they are needlessly committed under the specious and plausible pretext of flying to her assistence.
The End of the First Part.
A
TREATISE
OF
MIDWIFERY.
Part the Second.
Containing various observations on the labor and delivery of lying-in women, including a discussion of the pretended necessity for the employing instruments.
Introduction.
Notwithstanding the numerous productions of writers on the art of succoring women in labor, all that has hitherto appeared on that subject, still leaves the mind unsatisfied; not that it is so unjust as to expect perfection in any human art, but from its feeling that, in this particular one, too much is given to theory, and too little to the practical part, or manual function.
While the causes of difficult labors are far from solidly or sufficiently explained, and rather obscured by a cloud of scientific jargon, than practically illustrated, they give us no tolerably sure method for preventing or remedying those difficulties. On the contrary, the whole boasted improvement of the art is reduced, to a pernicious recourse to instruments, which cut at once the knot they cannot unty.