“Roussel was endowed with a delicate constitution. He had been suffering more than usual for many days, when he quitted Paris to retire into the country, to M. Falaize, near Chateaudun. Enfeebled by prolonged sufferings, he soon yielded to the attack of a fever which raged epidemically in the neighbourhood. He sank under it the second complementary day of the year X. (1802), aged about sixty years. Roussel had possessed devoted friends; those who survived him remained faithful to his memory. Alibert recorded his life with touching eloquence. He did more; he collected his principal writings, of which some were disseminated in the journals, and published an edition of his works.”
This account of Roussel, brief as it is, will suffice to inform our readers that he was no ordinary man, and that, from his learning, and long experience as a physician, his opinions and reflections upon “the pretended art” of man-midwifery are entitled to the greatest respect. Those who would ridicule his sentiments, and treat his arguments as false and visionary, and his ideas as antiquated and unsuited to the taste and advancement of the present day, are those who, from mean and despicable motives of self-interest, would confirm the vicious system which Roussel has denounced, and, while destroying woman’s modesty, would erect their own fortune on its ruins.
Towards the end of the preface to the Physical and Moral System of Woman, will be found the following sentences, which we would commend to the serious consideration of every man whose sense of decency has not been altogether obliterated, and whose mind still retains any of those finer feelings, which God, when he made man in his own image, implanted in the human breast. “It is not the same, perhaps, with the abuses introduced by that art, almost unknown among the ancients, which, under the pretence of assisting nature in producing man, itself sometimes prevents his seeing the light, in attempting to do that which she unaided could more effectually perform; which enervates in woman, by effeminacy and the needless lengthening out of precautions, the instinct, which alone puts them in a condition to do without it. In fine, which, by a usage, as indecently as unreasonably repeated in men’s attendance upon women, enfeebles, and at length annihilates the sentiment which most adorns the sex. I have made some reflections upon this pretended art in the chapter which treats of natural labour.” Again, in the chapter on pregnancy, Roussel speaks trumpet-tongued, not only against the indelicacy, but of the absolute inutility of those digital examinations per vaginam now in vogue, and so dogmatically prescribed in the text books of midwifery.
“As the instant when a woman conceives does not manifest itself in her by any well characterized expression, and the consequences of this act remain for some time concealed by a thick veil, that spirit of unrest which ordains that man, dissatisfied with the present which he may enjoy, should ever press on towards that future, which he perhaps shall never see, induces him to seek with eagerness the as yet hidden signs of pregnancy, and to question nature long before she deigns to speak. Men might, in this respect, spare themselves the torments of needless impatience, since it can neither accelerate nor retard its object. It would be much more in order to wait patiently until the natural signs themselves announce pregnancy, than that the tentatives by which it is pretended they are anticipated should annoy women weak enough to submit to them, without throwing any more light on the motive which suggests a recourse to them.
“These tentatives are the work of a shameless charlatanism, which solicits them, and which disports itself with chastity and decency, to establish its empire upon the ruins of a virtue to which the sex owes its own most solid foundations.
“We here feel ourselves compelled to inform women, that those whom they employ at this kind of trials deceive them, in affecting a knowledge which they do not possess. All information derived from the touch is very uncertain. The concurrence of external and obvious signs can alone be reckoned on; such as the increased size of the abdomen, the swelling of the bosom, preceded by qualms, nausea, and suppression of the menses. But the most decisive of all, by the actual avowal of all men-midwives, the sole indubitable proof consists in the movements of the infant, which make themselves felt towards the fourth month of pregnancy. Thus women can inform themselves better than any one whether they are with child, and the men-midwives, who are forced themselves to acknowledge this, ought to erase from their treatises on midwifery the nonsensical rules which they give upon the touch.[33] To give an idea of the solidity and wisdom of these rules, I need cite but one, taken from a work of one of the most celebrated men-midwives. ‘When one is called on,’ says he, ‘to examine a girl by the touch for some suspicion of pregnancy,[34] one ought at first to introduce the finger with caution, for fear of deflowering her, if she was not so.’ Is not this the very climax of absurdity to be willing, upon the simple suspicion of an evil which, perhaps, is imaginary, to produce a real injury, to expose one’s self, for the sake of knowing whether a girl had committed a fault, to the rendering more easy to her all those which she might commit in future, by destroying the prime bulwark which in her opposes itself to vice; in fine, to deflower a girl in order to discover whether she had lost her virginity?[35] And unhappily again for the rule, the means which it points out are insufficient to attain the desired information. It is from time alone that this revelation may be expected. Three or four months of patience will enlighten you more than can this dangerous practice, the disgraceful essays of which are worse than the doubts that they would dissipate. Although the inconveniences of this practice are not so considerable for women as for girls, we would never do them the injustice to suppose, that it would not be painful for them to consent to an examination which ought to humiliate them in their own eyes, and which must sometimes render them contemptible in the eyes of others: they should free themselves from this torturing ceremony, though there was no other reason for it than its inutility for the object which induces them to submit to it.”[36] Again, in the chapter on natural labour, Roussel says:—
“Final causes, which some philosophers would banish as a barren principle (which is perhaps true in natural philosophy), are in medicine the foundation of the most solid truths, which the ancients, and above all, Hippocrates, have transmitted to us. They have perhaps supposed that it was too trite and too commonplace to think that the Creator, who presided at the formation of our bodies, had made the mouth to eat, the eyes to see, and the ears to hear. We know not if it required much effort and subtle reasoning to divest them of the first ideas of common sense, but it seems to us, that they who reject altogether final causes discard perhaps as much truth as those who have most misused them, for it must be owned, that certain writers have made a strange use of them. Not to travel out of the subject which occupies us, we may quote M. Astruc,[37] who alleges that the coverings of the fœtus, in engaging themselves at the same time with it in the orifice of the womb, serve to line that passage, and to defend it against the bruisings of the fœtus, and the fingers of the midwife. To suppose that nature, in arranging the objects which should assist delivery, had contemplated the awkwardness of male and female midwives, is to impute to her a foresight which unhappily would be only too necessary, but that she had little for the errors that we are able to commit. She has done all for the best in our favour, so much the worse for us if we mar her work. It must be, said the same author, that its face (of the fœtus) was turned from the side of the os sacrum, to prevent its nose from being crushed by the bones of the pubes, and that it might not be suffocated by the waters of the amnios. A child that had been living nine months in water to be suffocated, when passing out of it, by a few drops! O Astruc! have you well considered this?
“Without, then, ascribing to nature frivolous fears, or confining her to details which she disdains, we may reasonably believe that after having alloted to different organs destined to aid in generation, the modifications most suitable to the conception of the child, and its preservation during pregnancy, she would afford those also which should, with the least inconvenience, effect its exit from the maternal bosom.”[38]
After describing the process of nature in parturition, Roussel goes on to say:—“O Rubens! I leave to your pencil the care of expressing that touching state in which the last impressions of abated pain still tinge the serenity of purest joy; where the melancholy, caused by sufferings now terminating, is not yet effaced by the most delightful sentiments which can animate the soul; where the dread of losing life, natural enough in suffering, gives place to the delicious pleasure of having presented it to a new being. But wherefore must it be, that this state is the price of a train of inconveniences, and a gradation of suffering often insupportable; and why are we here compelled to envy the kinds of animals amongst which pregnancy is without embarrassment, and delivery almost without a pang, or at least exempt from the sad or fatal consequences which so often follow it in the human species? It would, nevertheless, be wrong to tax nature with injustice.[39] We yet find races in whom her primitive impress has never been effaced by the abuses of a refined society, and amongst whom women enjoy nearly the same privileges as the females of animals.
“The women of the Ostiaks, it is said,[40] never have any uneasiness about the time of their delivery, and take none of those precautions which European effeminacy renders almost indispensable. They are delivered wherever they may happen to be without any inconvenience; they, or the persons who assist them, plunge the new-born infant into water or snow, and the mother returns immediately to her ordinary occupations, or continues her march, if on a journey.[41] As these people dwell in the vicinity of the Samöides,[42] between the fifty-ninth and sixtieth degree of north latitude, they do not fail to attribute this vigorous constitution to the severity of the climate.