[32] The Speculum; its moral Tendencies. By a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. London: Bosworth & Harrison.
[33] Vide Ramsbotham, anté.
[34] “It was to the midwives that they applied, in the first ages of the Church, to be assured of that fidelity which Christian virgins had vowed to their state of chastity. But, if the Fathers found fault from the time when Christian females were thus exposed to the judgment of their own sex; if they discovered in this practice something shameful and infamous, of what criminality would they not have taxed the attempt of men at the present day, who, in like cases, are not ashamed to deprive the midwives of this employment.”—Hecquet, De l’Indecence aux Hommes d’accoucher les Femmes, page 7.
[35] O ye adepts in chloroform, take heed to your ways, and O ye fools, who submit to be made dead-drunk under its influence, beware lest a worse thing happen unto you!
“It would be absurd to suppose that the cases of sudden death from chloroform constitute the full measure of the mortality. How few even of these are generally known or reported. Hardly any in private practice; and now, even in hospitals, they are concealed. It is well known to the frequenters of the London hospitals, that, in the same week in which the recent death from chloroform at St. Thomas’s occurred, another took place in another hospital, but which did not become the subject of judicial inquiry. Humanity, and the character of the profession, demand that the whole subject should be investigated anew.”—Medical Times and Gazette.
[36] Roussel, page 177, de la Grossesse.
[37] Maladies des Femmes, t. v., p. 375.
[38] Roussel, de l’Accouchement Naturel, page 208.
[39] “It is a common notion, that the brute enjoys great advantages, compared with woman, in the act of parturition, from the position and configuration of its pelvis. Is not this groundless? In the first place it is said that the oblique axis of the brim, in woman, is less favourable to the descent of the fœtal head than the axis of the brim in the brute, which is parallel with the spine. But the physiologist knows, that ordinarily in woman, just before the commencement of the labour pains, the uterus slowly, and without pain, descends by a mechanism, which Sir C. Bell has so beautifully described in his memoir on the muscularity of that organ; and that thus a small segment of the fœtal head becomes engaged in the brim, and in the position most favourable for passing, before the uterine pains commence. The truth is, the obliquity of the axis of the brim is, in general, no disadvantage or impediment whatever. In the second place, it is urged, that the great size of the human fœtal head occasions incomparably more difficulty than the sharp-pointed, small head of the brute fœtus. For this there is equally no foundation. The size and figure of the human brim are as well fitted to give passage to the large head of the child, as the brim of the brute pelvis to allow the entrance of the comparatively smaller head of the fœtal brute, &c., &c. Still looking at the figure of the human fœtus, and comparing it with that of the fœtal brute, some may be inclined to imagine, notwithstanding what has been said, that the brute will pass with far greater facility than the child; such was my own opinion till I subjected the point to the test of experiment. We are not to think, but to try, as John Hunter advises,” &c.—Roberton, Physiology, &c., p. 247.
[40] L’Histoire General des Voyages.