[50] “While such are the prominent vices and defects of the poor, vices and defects of a different kind, but no less offensive to morality, are found among the rich. Sensuality and excess, selfishness, evil speaking, want of charity and kindness abound. All these are obstacles to moral and philosophical progress. Upon what can we rely to counteract them? Upon the force of civilization? Twice have its powers been tried and found wanting. In the days of Augustus Cæsar, when order had been established and prosperity revived, when Virgil and Horace flourished at Rome, and the vast provinces of the Roman Empire were blest with peace and tranquillity, everything seemed to promise a long duration of happiness. But the Christian Apostle and the Pagan Satirist alike prove all was hollow and delusive. Vice increased, knowledge decayed, power vanished, and soon everything portended the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Again, in the eighteenth century of our era, civilization had reached a very high point. That century, enlightened above all its predecessors, which enjoyed the literature of the age of Louis XIV. in France, and of Queen Anne in England, when Racine, Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine, Dryden, Pope, Addison, and Swift were read and admired; when Newton’s philosophy was established; when La Voisier, and Black, and Cavendish had advanced chemistry to a science, and Watt had, by his improvement of the steam engine, rivalled the invention of the printing press, seemed, in its course, tending to the happiness of nations. But before that century ended, revolutions tearing up the foundations of society, wars desolating all the nations of Europe, bore sad testimony to the mistake that had been made. What was that mistake? The nature of man is so prone to evil that a strong restraint is required to keep down his bad passions, and subdue his vicious inclinations. He requires, likewise, some special incentive to good. The legislators of antiquity sought that restraint upon evil, and that incentive to good, in powerful institutions guarded by sanctity of manners. It was thus that Sparta and Rome were led to virtue. But these institutions perished when manners no longer supported them.”—Lord John Russell. Lecture delivered at Exeter Hall, on the Obstacles which have retarded Moral and Political Progress, November, 1855.
[51] “I know that our philosophy, always abounding in singular maxims, pretends, contrary to the experience of all ages, that luxury forms the glory of states; but after having forgotten the necessity of sumptuary laws, will she yet dare to deny that good manners are essential to the duration of empires, and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good manners?”—Rousseau Discours, p. 67.
[52] “It was (says M. Astruc) at the first delivery of Mademoiselle de la Valliere, and for the safer keeping of the secret. It was feared that the presence of a midwife in the palace, where suspicion reigned already, would furnish fresh food for the malign curiosity of the courtiers; to impose on them they made use of a surgeon whose practice attached him to the court. For the rest, it cannot be denied that there have been, in every age, men who studied or taught the art of midwifery. We have treatises on midwifery of very ancient date, written by physicians. Surgeons, while exercising themselves in other surgical operations, did not neglect that of midwifery. But the habitual and daily custom of delivery was never established as it is at present; they interfered only in difficult cases, where it was believed that an experienced operator was required.”
[53] There is a work of M. Hecquet, entitled De l’ Indecence qu’il y a aux Hommes d’accoucher les Femmes.
[54] “There are, nevertheless, women, even now, whom it would be impossible to induce to be delivered by men. We speak not of those localities where this employment is confided to women, but in towns, where men-midwives are more in vogue. There is, it is said, a great Queen in Europe who has an accoucheur of whom she never makes use. Women deliver her, and the man-midwife is in the ante-chamber, as a witness of the tribute yet paid to a custom which had been renounced.”
We fear that, in these “days of advance,” even Majesty itself has succumbed to the prevailing fashion.
[55] “Sisters of Charity,” page 75.
[56] “While Miss Nightingale is showing the world the great good to be achieved by ladies devoting themselves to the sick and suffering in hospitals, there is a lady in Paris who has actually worked her way to the title of M.D. The lady in question is Dr. Emily Blackwell, daughter of the late Mr. Samuel Blackwell, of Bristol, and has, it appears, a sister practising in New York, as a regular physician, armed with the authority of a diploma. Dr. Elizabeth, like Dr. Emily, completed her medical studies in Paris. To the latter lady the Paris hospitals have been freely opened, and Dr. Emily Blackwell has followed the clinical lectures of Jobert de Lamballe, Huguier, Casenove, Guersaint, and Blanche; and on the Register of the great hospital of the Hotel Dieu may be seen the first woman’s name ever entered, as a medical student, on its books. The intense earnestness with which the lady doctor labours to make herself perfect mistress of those branches of the art which chiefly concern women and children, has not only overcome prejudice, but made her a favourite with her able instructors, who have been brought to say, that there can be no more objection to the presence of ladies in hospitals, practising as physicians, than to nurses. Baron Sentin, one of the Physicians in Ordinary to the King of the Belgians, has invited Dr. Emily Blackwell to visit the great women’s hospital at Brussels.”—Daily News.
[57] A respected correspondent has communicated to us the following extract from a recent paper:—“There are not far from twenty of them, and several of them are in excellent business. They confine themselves generally to midwifery, and the diseases of their own sex. Their success in the former branch tends to establish them firmly in families. The number will probably be gradually on the increase, since they are beginning to be employed in the neighbouring cities of Charlestown, Cambridge, Roxbury, and adjacent towns, much more than formerly.”
Among these female physicians the Misses Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell, natives of Bristol, are justly celebrated. See an interesting sketch of the life of Miss Emily Blackwell in the Englishwoman’s Review, June, 1857.