“Yonder a vile physician, blabbing
The case of his patient...;”
or he may be a tippling, jovial fellow, who at some roystering party is always called on for “a good song,” sure to have as its theme wine, love, and woman,—for accoucheurs are mortals like other men; or he may be some tyro in “the art,” just let loose from his course of walking the hospitals, strong in syphilitic cases, and with all the recollections of a young surgeon’s life fresh upon him: nevertheless, whatever he be, the very inmost secrets of your wife’s person are known to him,[19] the veil of modesty has been rudely torn aside, and the sanctity of marriage exists but in the name.
——“Such an act,
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty;
Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there; makes marriage vows
As false as dicer’s oaths: oh, such a deed,
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: heaven’s face doth glow;
Yea this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.”
CHAPTER II.
“O shame! where is thy blush?”
It now becomes our most painful but necessary task to explain what that “process” is to which we have alluded, by giving some extracts from one of the principal works on midwifery, and in the very words of the treatise, to prove the gross outrages to which women are obliged to submit when “attended” by these male practitioners. Nothing but a sense of the enormity of this monster evil would induce us to contaminate our pages by the introduction of such garbage; but we are well aware that “general observations make little impression on the mind even of the most reflecting reader, if not attended with a detail of facts which proves that it is well founded; and one authentic example will produce a stronger conviction than whole chapters of assertion.”
EXTRACTS FROM DR. RAMSBOTHAM’S OBSTETRIC MEDICINE AND SURGERY.
“Duties of the Medical Attendant under Natural Labour.