Many other modern practitioners advise the use of one or two crotchets, be the child dead or alive, or of a tire-tête, made in form of strait blades, with spoon-bills, to introduce them one after another into the uterus; and after having placed them on each side of the child’s head, and made them meet together, to try the extraction with them.
This last contrivance, as ingenious as it may appear, does not save the child’s life, as all these authors would insinuate. For these instruments, wherever they are applied, must pierce to get a solid hold; without which they could serve for nothing but to crush or lacerate the teguments; so that they should not be used where the child is a live one: and even when it’s dead, the mother is not absolutely safe from the damage they may do, whatever precaution the operator may take, or whatever may be his dexterity of hand. If one of the blades should slip, which frequently happens, it will be difficult for him not to do the mother a mischief. For as to the child, it is very rare that the crotchet does not instantly destroy it.
Menard has again given us another figure of an instrument, to appearance less dangerous; but the make of it sufficiently denotes its want of power in the operation, which is also confirmed by the testimony of the most celebrated practitioners.
It is now (1760) about forty years ago, that Palfin, a surgeon of Ghent in Flanders, and demonstrator of anatomy in the same town, went to Paris, and there presented to the academy of sciences an instrument for extracting, by the head, children stuck in the passage. Gilles le Doux, surgeon of the town of Ypres, put in his claim to the invention of this curious instrument, which has however been ever looked upon as insufficient, and to have too much bulge, to allow its introduction into a place already so difficult by its being blocked up with the body that requires the extraction. After at least a dozen of corrections of this pretended tire-tête or forceps of Palfin, Gilles le Doux himself corrected it, so did afterwards Messieurs Petit, Gregoire, Soumain, Duffé, and I do not know how many more.
In short, one may say, that never did any instrument undergo more alterations than this forceps has done. One of the greatest improvements, according to the opinion at the time here in England, which it received, was that given it by Dr. Chamberlain. Chapman, whose treatise on midwifery is esteemed, to give this tire-tête the greater lustre, tells us, that Dr. Chamberlain kept this instrument a long while a secret; and that the Dr.’s father, his two brothers, and himself, used it with good success. Mr. Boëhmer, public professor of physic and anatomy at Hall, in the Lower Saxony, in the College Royal of Frederic, and of the society of curious Naturalists, from whom I quote this, calls this instrument, I am here speaking of, the English tire-tête, or forceps.
All due honor be to the original author of this sublime invention of the forceps, whoever was the happy mortal! happy, I say, according to Dr. Smellie, who calls it a “fortunate contrivance”[[36]]; though perhaps by fortunate, he rather means its having been so to himself. For hitherto, in all truth, I must own, that I do not find, even by the most exagerated accounts of the learned men-midwives, that those poor instruments of God’s making, the women’s fingers, would not much better, and much safer, do every thing that is pretended to be done by that same boasted instrument, or that can be done by any other human means.
But let us suppose for an instant, what both my love and knowledge of the truth would hinder me from granting, that instruments are at some times, and in some sort necessary: in what case is it that they are necessary? this is what hitherto I do not know. And which instrument is it that a man-midwife must use? that is what I yet know less: nor do I believe there is any practitioner so presumptuously silly, as to admit any particular one, as the only one universally received and approved. It will perhaps be said, that according to the circumstances, each practitioner will, out of his bag of hard-ware, pick out that which will be fit for the occasion. But then, a waggon would not carry their whole armory, to calculate not only according to the various alterations made, if but in the forceps, by whim, desire of getting a name, or of increasing practice, but according to the various exigencies and circumstances to which the form of the instrument ought to be peculiarly adjusted. And upon every occasion, there is not the time for inventing, directing, or making a new instrument. But if it is said, that for want of such exactness, the general make of an instrument must do, in all cases: that general make is not at least to be looked for in any of the kinds I have already quoted, by which such numbers of women and children must have been tortured or sacrificed, before they were exploded and given up, as good for nothing or insufficient, even by the men-practitioners themselves, who however substituted no others to them but what were rarely less exceptionable. They were only newer. Let us then now proceed to pass in a summary review the later and pretended improvements of this prodigious invention of the forceps, and candidly examine the validity of their claim over the women’s hands.
Mr. Rathlaw, a famous surgeon of Holland, in his dissertation on the means, or secret of Roger Roonhuysen, which was transmitted to his heirs, for extracting (as was said) in a very little time, a child, whose head should be embarrassed in the neck of the uterus, says thus,
“To me it appeared impossible, to establish an instrument, whose use should be so certain, so general, so necessary, that one could not be a man-midwife without having a knowledge of it.”
The same Mr. Rathlaw, in the same piece, exclaiming against the use of the crotchets has this remark.