It is certain then, that I have not the least intention to attack any particular persons, any farther than in what I conceive to be false theory, or mispractice in the art I profess; I hope then it will not be imputed to me as unfair or over-presumptuous, if I especially do not over-respect writers or practitioners, who themselves have not respected either common-sense or common-humanity.
Have not some of our modern authors, especially the male-practitioners, who in these later times have treated of midwifery, added new and worse errors of their own to those bequeathed to us by the antients, whom they have insulted, as they themselves will probably one day be, but with more reason, by their successors, if the world should continue blind enough for them to have any in this profession? One would even imagine, that in the criticisms in which they indulge themselves of one another’s systems and instruments, they are inflicting part of the punishment due for their common offences against Nature, in the abuse of an Art, originally intended to assist her. At the same time, even from their own showing, nothing can be plainer, than that their boasted inventions have, under the specious pretence of improvement, fallen from bad to worse, as is ever the case of superstructures on the crazy foundation of false principles.
Read the men-writers on this art, and you will find interspersed in most of them, amidst the most flagrant proofs of their own ignorance of it, reproaches to that of the midwives, too just, perhaps as to some, but shamelessly absurd in them, who to that ignorance substitute their own subtilities of theory, which, when reduced to practice, are infinitely worse than any deficiency in some particular female-practitioners; being mostly, in truth, fit for nothing so much, as to prepare dreadful work for their instruments.
But if they so falsely exalt their own learning above the ignorance of women; they have their reason for it. They seek to drive out of the practice those who stand in the way of their private interest: that private interest, to which the public one is for ever sacrificed under the specious and stale pretext of its advancement.
Can it then be wrong in any of our sex and profession to endeavour, at least, to justify ourselves, and to undeceive the public, of the ill and false impressions which have been given it of our talents and ability? Pernicious prejudices have sometimes their run, like epidemical distempers: and surely it is more for the service of mankind, that their duration should be shortened, than suffered to proceed without at least an endeavour to oppose them.
I should, however, be much more pleased with an exemption from the disagreeable task of composing the apology of our sex in this matter, it being contrary to that modesty which becomes us so well; but as the men-midwives, in their system of exalting their powers of Art over ours of Nature, keep no measures with truth, I see myself forced to do justice to our function, and to manifest the unreasonableness of that contempt, with which they treat and depreciate our services; and with which they have, in favor of their own interest, perhaps too successfully imbued the public.
In this attempt of mine there is no blamable ostentation. If I set in their just light of utility the qualifications of the women of our profession, as to industry, dexterity, ease of execution, patience, constitutional tenderness, and especially natural aptitude, it is no more than practical truth warrants, and the throwing a due light into the matter of comparison requires. Yet I do not wish, that we should pass for any thing beyond what we really are. All the partiality, all the tender feelings it is so natural for me to have for the sufferings of my own sex, would be sufficient to with-hold me from desiring to establish any opinion or practice tending to endanger the personal safety of women in child-birth, or of any thing so dear to them as their children. I am myself a mother.
I own however there are but too few midwives who are sufficiently mistresses in their profession. In this they are some of them but too near upon a level with the men-midwives, with this difference however in favor of the female practitioners, that they are incapable of doing so much actual mischief as the male-ones, oftenest more ignorant than themselves, but who with less tenderness and more rashness go to work with their instruments, where the skill and management of a good midwife would have probably prevented the difficulty, or even after its coming into existence, prove more efficacious towards saving both mother and child; always with due preference however to the mother.
I will also, with the same candor, own that there are some not intirely incapable men-midwives: but they are so very rare, and must forever necessarily be so, and even, at the best, so inferior to good midwives, that a worse office could scarce be done to mankind, that on so false a supposition as that of a sufficient ability in them, to explode the practice of the art by women, because some of them might be exceptionable. And how should it be otherwise, than that some should be more deficient than others? is there that art in the world, to which the same objection does not lie of different degrees of merit in the professors of it, as well as that of the imperfection of all human arts in general?
In the mean time, the consequences of this unfair conclusion against the women professors of midwifery, in affording the men a plea for supplanting them, do not hitherto appear very advantageous ones to the public. It remains, I fancy, to be proved, that population is any gainer by the diminution of that evil, to which the instruments or other methods of practice, employed by the men, are pretended to be such a remedy.