[41] “During pregnancy the squaw continues her usual avocations, and, even in its most advanced state, she neither bears a lighter burthen on her back, nor walks a shorter distance in a day, than she otherwise would. If on a march she feels the pains of parturition, she retires to the bushes, throws her burthen from her back, and, without any aid, brings the infant into the world. After washing in water, if at hand, or in melted snow, both herself and the infant, she immediately replaces the burthen upon her back (weighing, perhaps, between sixty and one hundred pounds), secures her child upon the top of it, protected from the cold by an envelope of bison robe, and thus hurries on to overtake her companions.”—James’ Narrative of Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains.
[42] “The Samöides are a tawny, squat, miserable race of pagan savages, subjects of the Russian empire. They are found along the Frozen Sea, on the European side of the Jugorian Mountains, east of these on the River Oby, and elsewhere on the vast shores of Siberia. According to Tooke, they are mature at a very early age,” &c.—Roberton, quoting Tooke’s Russian Empire, vol. ii. p. 286.
[43] “The truth is, that when the pregnant will submit to prepare themselves for what is before them, will be temperate in their eating, regular in their hours for sleep, and for exercise daily in the open air, a considerable proportion may secure benign labours. It is the sedentary and luxurious who oftenest suffer severely in parturition,” &c. &c.—Roberton’s Notes on Pregnancy, p. 460.
[44] Roberton has a remark to the same effect.
[45] “The beasts ca’t manipulated.”—Shepherd on the Phrenologists, Noctes Ambrosianiæ, vol. ii. p. 21.
[46] “The calling of ‘accoucheur’ does not appertain to men. It is with them nothing but a usurpation, or a rash experiment, founded upon the timidity of women, who believe that, by this unworthy submission, they insure their lives; and upon the credulity of husbands, who, by this dangerous condescension, imagine that they more surely preserve their wives.”—Hecquet, De l’Indecence aux Hommes d’accoucher les Femmes, page 9.
“Ubi non est mulier, ibi ingemiscit æger.”
Where woman is not, there the sick man groans.
[48] “At the time when this work was published, there had appeared a catechism, in which M. Dufot, a physician, who was the author of it, proposed to himself to instruct the midwives in the country, and he set forth in a manner clear, exact, and perspicuous, the principles of the art of midwifery. It would be desirable that these ideas, which are sufficient for their purpose, should be disseminated; they would prepare the public to do without the help of men in an office where their agency seems necessarily to compromise morals. This object, to which some men only gave the attention which it deserved, is doubtless the one which has urged some intendants to occupy themselves in the instruction of midwives. We learn from the Gazette de France, of 25th September, 1776, that the dame Ducoudrai, commissioned and pensioned by his Majesty, had, by the care of M. Fontette, chief magistrate (intendant) of Caen, organized more than a hundred and fifty midwives in two public courts which she had held. That example, without doubt, will not be lost on the provinces; whatever the price of knowledge may be, it is in such close contiguity to the temptation to abuse it, that I dare hardly put up any prayers for my country. In all the County of Foix, where I was born, deliveries are intrusted to women of the lower order, who never have the least idea of anatomy, and with whom the whole art is reduced to some practical and traditionary customs. But they display zeal, patience, and uprightness, while the others apply themselves to nothing but the glitter of a scientific phantom, and the former cannot but succeed the best. I remember to have seen but one woman perish, in my little town, from the consequences of labour. It is true that, contrary to custom, she had been delivered by a man. The event was so distressing, that they had every cause to believe that nature reprobated such a fatal innovation.”
[49] Here let us illustrate the truth of Roussel’s observations, by a statement of facts which have occurred in our own day:—The Portafoglio Maltese (October, 1856), in describing the frightful effects of a late earthquake in Candia, gives the following:—“In one case a woman was discovered alive under the fallen ruins. She had been miraculously preserved by a beam falling in such a manner as to leave a small space, where she remained eight days without food before being discovered. During this time she gave birth to a child, which was also alive. Another woman was being delivered when the earthquake commenced; the husband and three women who were attending her fled. On the husband returning after the panic was over, on removing the ruins of his house, he found his wife with her child in her arms alive in a corner of one of the rooms, which had only partly fallen in. During the awful moment she had been safely delivered.”