THE keen instrumentarians bring an argument they imagine capable of
banishing or exterminating all the midwives. The men, they say, enjoy
alone the glorious privilege of using instruments, in order, as they
pretend, to assist nature. But let them, I intreat of them, answer,
whether if the question could be decided by votes, where is the kingdom,
where is the nation, where is the town, where, in short, is the person
that would prefer iron and steel to a hand of flesh, tender, soft, duly
supple, dextrous, and trusting to its own feelings for what it is about:
a hand that has no need of recourse to such an extremity as the use of
instruments, always blind, dangerous, and especially for ever useless?
WHAT has engaged men to invent and bequeath to their successors so many
wonderful productions, for such they imagine them? Is it not the thirst
of fame and money? These gentry have judged, that they ought to spare no
lucubrations, no labor of the head, no efforts of the tongue and pen to
procure themselves a strange reputation, supported by these horrible
instruments. But these lucubrations, this labor of the head, would have
been much better employed in seeking for the means of absolutely doing
without them, as our good female practitioners have ever done, and as
those of them still do, who are instructed in the right practice.
WE are no longer in the times of the Pharaohs and the Herods, who
mercilessly massacred the innocents; we are no longer in the times of
those pure Arabs, who were the inventors of a number of cruel
operations, and of several instruments, which often cause more
apprehension and terror to a woman in labor, though concealed from her
light, but never from her imagination, than the actual presence of all
the apparatus of the rack, where that torture is in use.
IT were to be wished, that all the men-midwives, who had wrote on this
matter, had suppressed the mention of their instruments; for as their
books often fall into the hands of women, so deeply interested as the
sex is in that subject, it is not to be imagined what bad effects they
have. Their variations among themselves would be sufficient to frighten
the women: you meet with authors condemning in the morning the
over-night’s sentiment. I can observe them losing their way in
systematical errors, which explain nothing to me, and in which nothing
can be discovered but disagreement with one another, and with
themselves. The wisest and most able of them, after having well examined
all the kinds of instruments hitherto invented, have doubtless seen and
been convinced of their ridiculousness and usefulness, but all of them
have not hitherto dared to speak out and say as much.
THE most interested of them would fain persuade us, that, in their
display of a whole armory of instruments, they have discovered the
philosopher’s stone of midwifery, in virtue of which they have a right
to wrest out of the women’s hands, the practice of an art, which nature
has appropriated to them. But certainly the point, and the whole point
is, to find an expert dexterous hand, the sex is out of the question,
provided it is but a human hand, and provided the work is done to the
satisfaction of society, it seems to me that nothing more need be
required.
OBJECTION the Seventh.
IT is only for the ignorant to be so rash as to raise an out-cry against
the use of all instruments; people who do not know the absolute
necessity there is for employing them on certain occasions. This clamor
must proceed “from the interested views of some low, obscure and
illiterate practitioners, both male and female, who think that they find
their account in decrying the practice of their neighbours.” Such is the
objection in the words of Dr. Smellie, in his Treatise on Midwifery
(page 241.) and for this panegyric, he prepares us in his Introduction
(page 55.) where, speaking of the midwives of the Hôtel Dieu of Paris,
he first indeed tells us, that the surgeons had, in that hospital,
perfected themselves in the art of midwifery; but then for fear that
from thence occasion might be taken of saying, that to women it was they
were beholden for that perfection; he takes care immediately after to
add, that what “got the better of those ridiculous prejudices which the
fair sex had used to entertain,” was, that the women or midwives of this
hospital “had recourse to the assistance of men in all difficult cases
of midwifery.”