I AGREE with you in the first part of your objection: but I absolutely
deny the consequences.
THERE are women, who, besides the gifts received from nature, are
improved by study, by reading, and experience, who succeed much more
easily than men in the practice. To say the truth, nature has, in this
point, been even lavish to the women, for this art is a gift innate to
them.
I WILL however own, that not all women indistinctly are proper for this
business; that there must be natural dispositions cultivated by art;
that a purely speculative knowledge is not sufficient; that there are
required good intellects, memory, strength of body and mind, sentiments,
some taste, and practice joined to theory; so that when I say that the
women are born with dispositions for this art; this can only be
understood in general, and relatively to the men, among whom those
dispositions are more rare, because they are less natural to them in
this branch.
WOULD it not be a sort of blasphemy against the divine providence to
maintain, that what God has placed and left in possession of the women,
was fitter for the men? the attentive, beneficent, and tender manner
with which he governed his people elect, obliges us to believe that he
omitted nothing of what was necessary or advantageous to it; since he
regarded that people as his own particular dominion and appendage;
honoring it with his presence, like a master in his dwelling-house, or a
father in his family. He had taken pleasure in the forming and
instructing it from its infancy. He put the women in possession of the
art of midwifery, he blessed, approved, and recompenced the midwives. It
is but just, that men should hear and keep silence where God speaks.
They may think themselves happy, to learn from him the true secrets of
nature, and not from those pretended doctors who abandon the rules of
truth to cleave to themselves; who, instead of her, present us with a
phantom of their own creation, who, in short, would make us the
worshippers of their dreams and imaginations.
THE women have for them the authority of God, who has declared himself
in their favor; they have for them the authority of men from one pole to
the other, who have in all ages made use of the female ministry in this
art. Such a plurality of votes has surely some claim to prevalence,
especially, since it is founded upon the natural order of things, upon
truth and reason supported by experience. This experience we have on our
side: none can deny it, without denying self-evidence.
ONE would think there is a kind of curse attends the operations of
men-practitioners, as I dare aver it for a truth, that difficult and
fatal labors have never been so rife, or so frequent, as since the
intermeddling of the men. Whereas, God has ever so blessed the work of
the midwives, that never were lyings-in so happily conducted, nor so
successful, as when the practice was entirely in their hands.
OPEN the book of Numbers, you will observe, that God having ordered
Moses to number his people: out of seventy individuals of the family of
Jacob, who had come to dwell in Egypt, two hundred and forty years
before, there had issued above six hundred thousand men fit to carry
arms, without taking into the account an almost infinite multitude of
children, of youths under twenty years of age, of women, of old men,
besides a whole tribe, that of Levi, which was entirely set apart for
the divine worship.
OBJECTION the Fifth.
THERE is no such thing as being a good practitioner of midwifery without
understanding anatomy: now this science is the province of a man, of a
physician, or surgeon, not of a woman.