Dr. Dickson says, in “The Destructive Art of Healing:”—“One of the greatest obstacles to the progress of medical truth in England, is the employment of surgeon-apothecaries as midwives—almost entirely monopolizing the practice of medicine by the influence which they have gained over the minds of our women; these people will countenance no physician who does not prescribe large quantities of useless, and too frequently deleterious medicine.
“The ladies of this country should take a lesson from the American ladies, who not only prefer midwives of their own sex, but actually employ female physicians. Female modesty and morality alike require that the diseases of women should be attended to solely by women; and all through the United States you now meet with regularly-bred female physicians, most of them having the degree of M.D. from a university, and many of them being in the enjoyment of large and lucrative practice.
“We have the pleasure of an acquaintance with Mrs. Dr. Longshore—she is a lady possessing a strong and original mind, close powers of perception and reasoning, and a thorough medical education. As a practical anatomist she has few superiors, even among practitioners of the ‘sterner mould.’ Mrs. Dr. Longshore is ‘a Friend,’ and her whole character is marked by the excellencies of the ‘Friends,’ or Quakers, as they are called. Placid, thoughtful, observant, full of sympathy, and governed by an active benevolence, she delights in doing good. Her practice is large, rapidly increasing, and generally successful, and she is devoutly attached to her noble profession....
“Medicine and midwifery are both domestic arts; woman is all but born a doctor. Ladies of England, think of this. Hitherto you have left the field of ‘labour’ to men who would be better employed with your distaffs and spindles. Mothers of England, you have a mission—fulfil it; proclaim to your daughters that the birth of a child is not a surgical operation, but a natural process; and that there is no case of parturition so difficult that may not be better managed by a well instructed woman than by a man, whose very presence in the sick chamber disturbs the uterine action, and causes the greater number of difficulties that occur in such cases.”
“In a country like England, to clear away a given folly is too often, unfortunately, only to make room for some other folly equally egregious. This, in our day, has been the case with medicine. Just as a considerable number of physicians had come to adopt my own view of the true constitutional origin of diseases, up sprung a class of people who will have it, that in the majority of female complaints, at least, there must ever be more or less of local wrong, which no possible constitutional treatment can cure! Whispering mysteriously the words ‘engorgement,’ ‘tumour,’ ‘inflammation,’ ‘ulceration of the os,’ ‘version,’ and ‘retroversion’—phrases for the most part invented for the mere purpose of striking panic into the hearts of families who must ever be in the dark here—these men straightway confine the patient to her couch—in which unnatural position they keep her for months, and, if possible, for years together—during which they subject her to the most odious treatment; performing, with speculum, caustic, and other dangerous appliances, the most daring and indecent operations....
“By the people to whose practices I have just alluded a woman is told all possible and impossible things—things the most frightful that imagination can conceive—to cure which, forsooth, she must lie on her back for months. And if this oracular sentence be enforced by two or more of their number, acting in consultation—anglicè in collusion—the weak creature believes accordingly. From that moment she is the dupe and the victim of the most unprincipled scoundrels, many of whom, by mixing up religion with their medical cant, contrive to bring some of the richer class of women to such a state, that they become annuities to those impostors throughout the greater part of their most unnatural and most miserable lives....
“If, in common with these medicines, then, every medicinal force will produce its own peculiar local effect, when swallowed by the mouth, why, in the case of ‘uterine disease,’ of all others, should any woman submit to the local application of any remedy that cannot be used thus without the odious manipulations of the persons whose conduct every right mind, when properly instructed, must deprecate?
“But, as a matter of fact, these manipulations, so far from curing any disease of the womb or its appendages, have actually set up in the sound structure a very large share of the possible diseases for which these people pretend to apply them; and some of the disorders thus set up too frequently cease only with the life of the victim. Men of England! if you only knew what your wives and daughters needlessly—mark that word!—needlessly experience at the hands of those ruthless cheats, your brows would burn with shame and indignation. How such brutality as these creatures practise ever came to pollute our shores, is one of the miracles of the times. A proper feeling in the minds of our women should have preserved them from the humiliation and torture to which they have been subjected; while Englishmen of all ranks should have united, long ere this, to expel from the land the sordid wretches who first introduced the grossness and indecency of the hospitals of Paris to the houses and hearths of a too-confiding nation!”
Again, the Author of “Physic and its Phases” brands these counterfeit professors with infamy in racy and vigorous verse:—
“Men, are you men—who lead such hybrid lives,
Who, being surgeons, sink into midwives?
If with the sex you seriously would vie,
Why not the distaff and the spindle try?
Throughout the Orient, Arab, Turk, and Jew
On such occasions, never send for you;
Not even the Nubian, by the harem door,
Dare show his face, until the birth is o’er.
Talk of the sanctity of married life—
Nation of fools! who thus degrade the wife!
At such a moment, when the feminine mind
Shrinks from the succour of her nearest kind,
Could you do worse, were she a courtezan,
Than to her chamber introduce a man?
No longer left to woman’s gentle care,
Travail is now her terror everywhere.
······
Once in the sick room, with an eye to fees,[58]
Tales they get up of uterine disease;
Disease, the realms of Physic never knew,
Till ‘speculating Simpson’ gave the cue;
And, working thus on woman’s weaker nerves,
They raise whatever ghost their purpose serves.
Then, not the young alone, but graver dames,
Fooled by mere phantoms with un-English names,
Endure ‘examinations’—Ladies, speak!
Do these not shock the soul and blanch the cheek?
Surprise comes first—next horror, ill disguised,
But soon to worse some get familiarized!
For what will trusting woman not believe
And bear, when ‘scientific men’ deceive?
With no suspicion of the game these play,
Their tales of terror haunt her night and day.
Now she dreads ‘tumour,’ now ‘occlusion,’ now
‘Version’ she talks of, with a ‘why’ and ‘how.’
Reasons, of course, and numberless occasions,
Have these quick rogues for their ‘manipulations.’
But who—immortal truth!—can justify
The frightful means they locally apply?
Caustics, that keep their patients always ill,
Yet ever ready to indorse their skill;
While abscess, ulcer, hæmorrhage itself,
Attest what men may CAUSE for love of pelf.
Note the result—whatever the pretext,
In soul, at least, the woman is unsexed;
Words that of yore would make her forehead flush,
She now blurts out to men without a blush!
Heavens! how can husbands, fathers, brothers lend
Their countenance to such an odious end!
In all the animal kingdom, where or when
Were such things needed—tell us, Englishmen!
Of ‘base chirurgery’ let the world take heed,
For this is base chirurgery indeed!”