AS for satisfactorily, no. It can only be concluded from this objection,
that the ignorance of the pretended men-midwives is very antient: and
yet posterior by much to the function of the midwives, since that is
coeval with the world itself, embraces all times, extends through all
parts of the earth, whereas we hear nothing of the other till the times
of Hippocrates.
NEVERTHELESS I greatly respect Hippocrates, and all the authors who have
treated of this art. Some thanks are due to them, though but from those
whom they have set to work in our days. Consider but the most celebrated
authors among them down to our times, there may be found in them great
progresses by degrees, especially in our modern writers on this subject.
Yet the most intelligent of them feel and confess that the matter is yet
far from exhausted. For after having studied all the treatises we have
upon it, there may, there must be perceived an aberration and emptiness
with which the understanding remains unsatisfied, and feels that much is
yet wanting to the requisite perfection.
NOTWITHSTANDING likewise the veneration confessedly due to Hippocrates,
I cannot dispense myself from saying the truth; he might be and
doubtless was an excellent physician: he has wrote upon all the female
disorders, and on the means of delivering them; he may have been
consulted in his time, but he can never pass for an able man-midwife.
His writings contain some violent remedies and strange prescriptions for
women in labor, which must be the produce of the most dangerous
ignorance of what is proper for them in that condition.
THIS author was also evidently ignorant of what concerns preternatural
deliveries, as indeed were his successors till the beginning of the last
century.
TO prove what I advance, there needs no recourse back to very remote
times: it will be sufficient to peruse the treatises of Ambrose Paræus,
Jacques Guillemeau, Peter-Paul Bienassis, printed 1602, and even that of
De la Motte, who is of this century, to own, that the practice of the
men-midwives was far from having attained any degree of perfection.
THE manner in which the antients proceeded, when the child presented in
an untoward situation, is a fully convincing proof thereof; since they
obstinately, in such cases, continued their efforts to reduce it to its
natural situation, in spite of a thousand difficulties and dangers,
instead of bringing it away footling, as is now done by all who
understand the right practice.
HIPPOCRATES is the first who discovered that wonderful secret of killing
the child, and bringing it away piece-meal from the mother’s womb. He
advises it, in the manner taken notice of by Dr. Smellie, in his
introduction, (page 10. & seq.) I do not know whether it is from that
branch of practice that he adopts him for “the father of midwifery” (p.
4.) but, what is certain is, that Galen, and all the successors of
Hippocrates, till towards the end of the last century, exactly followed
his method of not delivering women in hard labors, but by the means of
murderous instruments. I shall not here detain myself with rehearsing
the long legend Mr. Smellie gives us of all the authors who have written
on this subject to the time of Ambrose Paræus; time when to the
progresses made by the midwives of the Hôtel Dieu at Paris in the art of
midwifery, it was owing, that the surgeons, guided by their superior
lights, made some greater progress towards perfection.
THAT the reader however may not suspect me of exaggeration, or
over-straining points, I request of him to suspend his judgment, to have
the patience to hear me out to the end, and he will find, that I have
here advanced nothing but what in the sequel stands clearly and
manifestly proved.
OBJECTION the Fourth.
IN a word, the manual operation of midwifery is an art, a science, and
as such consequently more competently to be professed by men, than by
women. It is making the art cheap, say the moderns, to allow the
practice of it to women.