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

In conformity to its claim of importance, this art appeared in all its lustre among the Jews, the Egyptians, the Athenians and Romans, and indeed in all nations during thousands of ages. Nor was the confinement of the exercise of it to women deemed any derogation to it. It even gave honor to its professors of that sex. Socrates, so ennobled by his character of being the greatest philosopher in all antiquity, did not disdain to boast himself the son of a very able midwife Phanarete, as may be seen in Plato’s book on science, in Diogenes Laertius and others.

Among the Egyptians and the Greeks it cannot be hard to conceive what emulation, what ardor it must have excited among the women of that profession, the custom of distributing prizes to those of the greatest merit in it, in the face of the people. No one is ignorant of the power of honors and distinction to bring arts to perfection.

But from the instant the midwives sunk into dis-esteem, and wherever that has happened, it will be found by woeful experience, that not only the art itself has suffered in the very midst of the most falsely boasted improvements, but that human-kind itself has much and very justly to complain of the change.

The native inconstancy and levity of the French nation opened the first inlet, in these modern-times, to men-practitioners. In antient history we meet with but one feeble attempt of that sort, which however soon gave way to the united powers of modesty and common sense. In France, and may it not be the same case soon here! the women of a competent class of life and education, begin to decline forming themselves for this profession, as beneath them, considering the slight put upon those women who exercise it.

Nor has this injustice remained unpunished. Many women have found, by severe experience, their having been enemies to themselves, in abandoning or slighting those of their own sex, from whom, at their greatest need, they used to receive the most effectual service, and who alone are capable of discharging their duty by them, with that sympathy for their pains, that tender affectionate concern, which may so naturally be expected from those who have been, are, or may be subject to the same infirmities.

Many out of a distrust inspired them of midwives, have thrown themselves into the hands of men, who have promised them infinitely more than they were able to perform; and who behind all the tender alluring words, of superior skill and safety in the employing of them, conceal the ideas with which they are full, of cutting, hacking, plucking out piece-meal, or tearing limb from limb.

The murder of so many children, the fruits of their bowels, might, one would imagine, have induced mothers to consider this point a little more carefully. Yet, through the prevalence of groundless fears, and of imaginary dangers they have run into real ones, and have sometimes found their death precisely where they sought their life; and not seldom where nature has even favored them enough in their labor, for them not to need any extraordinary ministry of art, the men have put them to cruel and dangerous tortures.

Notwithstanding some examples, and many violent presumptions of such mal-treatment, too many women have been so miserably misled by fashion, as to prefer the betraying the cause of their own sex, and the subjecting themselves to those who deceive them with false hopes, to the entrusting their preservation to those of their own sex, in the hands of which the care of it has been for so many ages, with so much reason, and such little cause of complaint.

Yet we do not see that any of these men-midwifes have been capable of forming a good midwife. On the contrary, we see, that in order to remedy the abuses, or rather to prevent the fatal accidents which every day occur in the practice of a profession so necessary to the preservation of the human species, they were in France obliged to have recourse to one of the ablest midwives in that kingdom, who was placed at the head of the practice in the Hôtel Dieu at Paris, to preside over the lyings-in there, and to found and cultivate that inexhaustible seminary of excellent female practitioners, who have actually restored the art to its antient degree of esteem, with all fair judges. These worthy proficients have been so public-spirited, as to communicate their talents and knowledge to a number of surgeons, who never had any reason to be ashamed of the lessons they assiduously took from the midwives, unless indeed for themselves not being able to come up to them in the practice, so true it is, that the business is not at all natural to them.

Yet have even many of those very men-practitioners, influenced by that self-interest which has such a power in all human affairs, revolted against their mistresses in the art, and their benefactresses. They have, at various times, commenced lawsuits, about the Hôtel Dieu at Paris, in order to get the lyings-in there committed to them: but the administrators, the persons of a just sense of things, together with the parliament of that town, ever attentive to decency, without excluding the due regard to the preservation of the subjects, have constantly opposed and frustrated the pretentions of these innovators. These again thus disappointed, were forced to content themselves with practising upon some women of quality, under the favor and protection of some of the old ladies of the court of Lewis XIV. who had their reasons for propagating this fashion. And now these innovators, not without a due proportion of ingratitude to the injustice, began to run down the midwives, and exalt themselves. The novelty prevailed, and the contagion of example soon communicated itself to the provinces, and thence into neighbouring nations. A few men perhaps of real abilities, but governed by the most sordid interest, associated to their party a number of the most ignorant and unexpert practitioners, but who served to fill up the cry, and made a common cause against the midwives, whose pretended insufficiency was now to be pleaded in favor of themselves being admitted to supplant them. Nor was the concurrent attestation in their favor, of so many ages, during which the practice was entirely in female hands, to weigh any thing against the boasts of their own superior ability. They picked up and sounded loud a few real instances perhaps, and undoubtedly many false ones of faults of practice in women: though were the numbers of human creatures, who have barbarously perished by the unskilfulness of the practitioners, to be fairly liquidated, it would appear that fewer have been the victims of female ignorance, than of the presumption and indexterity of the men. The women are undoubtedly liable to error: there have even been monsters of iniquity among them, but certainly in no number to form a general prejudice against them: but as to the men they are all of them, as will be more fully demonstrated hereafter, naturally incapable of the exercise of this profession. A history of their murders might even be collected out of the books written by them to establish their superiority over the women. From Deventer, Mauriceau, and the most celebrated of their writers, amongst many excellent observations in the way of the chirurgical art, many of the grossest absurdities have escaped, where they transgress its bounds and go into that of midwifery. Some of those absurdities too are so glaring, that they have not even been overlooked by themselves.