I have however quoted the foregoing examples from M. De la Motte.
First, Because that he himself being a man-midwife, and greatly partial to the practice being best in the hands of men, his attestation must be the less suspicious: but especially, because he was a professed enemy to instruments, and adhered as closely as Nature would allow him, to the imitation of those midwives from whom he had received all his knowledge, and abused them afterwards for their ignorance, as if their communication to him of their knowledge could not have been, without leaving themselves wholly destitute of it to enrich him.
Secondly, Because, the stories which he relates upon his own knowledge, leaving me the fairest room to infer the necessary repetition of the like tragical wents wherever instruments are admitted, it became less invidious to specify them, than incidents of the like nature here: especially, I say here, in London, or in England, where the use of those instruments grows every day more and more rife, and must consequently furnish the more examples of pain, destruction and danger caused by them to the women, weak or prejudice-ridden enough to prefer the men to the women-practitioners.
Both Charity then and Prudence prescribe to me the not pointing out particular persons to whom I could impute mispractice. If any one will affect to treat this suppression as not owing thereto, but purely to an impossibility of specifying cases of that sort, and of proving them; I appeal to the candid reader, whether the nature of the charge considered, such a specification can be expected from me, since, from the examples I have produced, I pretend to infer no more than a probability, the grounds of which I submit to himself, of the repetition of the like acts from the same, or even from increasing the same practice.
It would not perhaps be otherwise impossible to give some instances. For example, I could expand a hint before given, of a man-midwife of this town, who passes for eminent in his profession, and who not above five years ago, was called to deliver a woman in labor, whose child presented an arm. This practitioner, instead of searching out for the feet, to extract this fœtus, that was quite alive, first plucks off one arm, then another, then, at length, gives over the job, and left the poor mother in this condition, who was forced to have recourse to a midwife to finish the delivery.
More than one operator, as I have before observed, in very natural deliveries, instead of bringing away the after-birth, tore out the body of the uterus; for all their boasted anatomy.
Another gentleman-midwife delivered a woman of a fine child, or rather received it, for it came naturally and easily. Upon which, he took it into his head that he would not deliver her of the after-birth, proposing to defer this work till next day. And so he would have done, if he had not casually met with a less senseless practitioner, who represented to him the danger to which, by so doing, he exposed the poor patient he had left, and advised him to go back as fast as he could to deliver her.[[31]]
I have myself been not a little surprized at hearing lately some ladies mention, with much approbation, the inimitable complaisance of certain gentlemen-midwives, who have the patience, as they call it, to wait five, six, seven hours by the clock, before they deliver of the after-birth after the issue of the child, and that out of tenderness to the patients, who, as they say, would be sadly off, if they fell into hands more quick and expeditious.
But while I am thus taking notice of the errors of practice in the men-practitioners, it may be objected to me, that I deal unfairly with my reader.
First, In not furnishing instances of male-practice of the midwives.