"The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon;
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes;
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth,
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary, then, best safety lies in fear."
We have already, in the foregoing pages, quoted the words of Roussel, a
celebrated French physician of the last century, whose delicate and
sensitive mind revolted at the indecency of the practice which had then
but lately been adopted in his country; and before we proceed to quote
more largely from the same author, we think it proper that our readers
should be made acquainted with the character of the man who so lovingly
exerted his great talents to release his countrywomen from the gross
thraldom of designing charlatans and empirical impostors.
Dr. Cerise, in the account of Roussel prefixed to the edition of the
Physical and Moral System of Women, published in Paris, 1855, says: "Among
the celebrated physicians that France has produced, a great number have
distinguished themselves not only by their erudition, but still more by
the elegance of their language, by the elevation of their sentiments, by
the profundity of their conceptions; their names belong to letters and
philosophy, as much as to medicine. Roussel is a member of that glorious
family of Petits, Bordeus, Vicq-d'Azyrs, Cabanis, Aliberts, which, at the
present day, is honourably represented by two writers, Pariset and
Reveille-Parise. Through them medicine is not only a useful, but it is
also an agreeable science.
"Let us hope, that so illustrious a family will not become extinct, and
that descendants worthy of it will faithfully keep alive the sacred fire,
perpetually threatened by the freezing breath of scientific materialism.
"Roussel was born at Ax, in the department of Ariege, in 1742. His
education, commenced in that town, was finished at Toulouse. His taste for
medical study manifested itself early. He betook himself to Montpellier,
where he profited by the scientific lectures of Lamure, Venel, and
Barthez. These medical studies completed, he was desirous of further
instruction, and came to Paris. He closely allied himself with Bordeu.
This physician, according to the expression of Alibert, was too
illustrious to be happy; the friendship of Roussel consoled his vexations;
but Bordeu soon died, and Roussel had the melancholy commission to
pronounce his funeral elogy. We are assured that love was the genius of
Roussel. "He was still very young," says his biographer, "when this
sentiment was awakened in his soul; it was then that his inspired
imagination began to meditate on the tastes, the manners, the passions,
and the habits of women, and that he made a constant study of their
physical constitution, and of the moral attributes which they derived from
it. He soon arranged the fruits which he had collected, and composed a
body of science interesting as its subject.
"Thus was written _the Physical and Moral System of Woman_. This treatise,
which agreed in its development with a title so imposing, has remained
superior to all those which have been written upon woman, without
excepting the remarkable work of M. Virey, which failed, perhaps, in
eclipsing that of Roussel, solely from its severer method and more
scientific manner of treatment. He soon undertook another treatise,
intended to serve as a pendant to the former. This new treatise, entitled
the _Physical and Moral System of Man_, was not completed, which, judging
from what he had published, is much to be regretted. He caused to be
inserted in the journals of the day, _An Essay on Sensibility_; _An
Account of Madame Helvetius_; a short dissertation, entitled, _Historic
Doubts on Sappho_; some remarks '_On the Sympathies_.' He had commenced a
lengthened work on Stahl, the celebrated head of the medical college,
called _Animist_, but this work remained unpublished; he reviewed the work
of Madame de Stael, upon the Affinities of Literature with Social
Institutions; he applied himself to combat the doctrine of the indefinite
perfectibility of the human spirit, developed by Condorcet, in one of his
most remarkable writings. The problem was then proposed in terms such as
could not afford any satisfactory conclusion--as yet the science of
history did not exist. He wrote upon the right of making a will, which he
regarded as inviolable and imprescriptible; he addressed public
exhortations to political electors, to remind them of their duties and of
their rights; he admired the institutions of Lycurgus, and published a
dissertation on the government of Sparta. It is thus that the empire of
circumstances under which France at present exists dominates over all
minds. Roussel, yet meditating with a tender partiality upon the physical
and moral constitution of woman, could not resist descending into the
arena of political discussion. Thanks to the moderation of his character,
his voice, in the midst of revolutionary storms, was hardly understood,
and his existence was not disturbed.
"Roussel loved retirement and unaffected manners. Traits of a charming
simplicity are related of him. Alibert congratulating him one day on the
marriage of one of his brothers, suggested that he should follow his
example and marry. 'I assure you,' replied the irresolute bachelor, 'that
this idea often occurs to me, but one must go before the priest, before
the magistrate--there is no end to the affair.' There are persons for whom
pleasing and indefinite fantasies have a charm which they love to prolong;
they seem to dread a real happiness which might deprive imagination of its
most smiling visions. Roussel was one of these persons. He was smitten
with a violent passion for a young and beautiful person whom he had
restored to health. Happy, doubtless, in secretly bearing a cherished
image in his heart, he refrained from giving utterance to his thoughts.
One day it was announced that this person was going to be married. 'Ah,'
cried he, '_I am so grieved; I could not have believed it_;' and he shed
abundant tears of regret. He was often sorrowful; in one of these fits of
melancholy, he ran at midnight to a physician of his acquaintance--'My
head turns,' said he; 'I feel myself very ill. I am come to you to implore
your attention.' Imbert reassured him, and calmed his alarmed
imagination. The two friends engaged in conversation, and Roussel forgot
his malady.
"Roussel was good; benevolence, a quality so precious to a physician, was
in him lovely and expansive. When he suffered, study was an asylum for his
grief, a refuge for his afflicted spirit. He found in the joys of the mind
a defence against the sorrows of the heart. His internal agitations
dissipated themselves thus without gall and without bitterness. His
excellence was proof even against evil days. He lived poor, but the
affectionate and delicate hospitality of a respectable family never
allowed him to perceive it. He could, thanks to the care of M. Falaize,
neglect, quite at his ease, both his affairs and his fortune, exercise his
profession with the confident and noble freedom so agreeable to elevated
minds; meditate without interruption upon Plato, Plutarch, and Rabelais,
and withdraw himself, without peril, from those petty torments which
impose themselves under the name of social proprieties. A perfect courtesy
with him was marvellously allied to good nature a little rough, and which
was not without a dash of mischief. Roussel no more sought honours than
fortune. He refused the offer of an honourable employment, made to him by
the Great Frederic. He failed, however, to be called to the legislative
body. He wanted only two votes. Powerful friends had designed him for the
Tribuneship. He declined that honour, urging the weakness of his voice,
and his timidity. Roussel was timid through excess of modesty.
"Roussel was endowed with a delicate constitution. He had been suffering
more than usual for many days, when he quitted Paris to retire into the
country, to M. Falaize, near Chateaudun. Enfeebled by prolonged
sufferings, he soon yielded to the attack of a fever which raged
epidemically in the neighbourhood. He sank under it the second
complementary day of the year X. (1802), aged about sixty years. Roussel
had possessed devoted friends; those who survived him remained faithful to
his memory. Alibert recorded his life with touching eloquence. He did
more; he collected his principal writings, of which some were disseminated
in the journals, and published an edition of his works."
This account of Roussel, brief as it is, will suffice to inform our
readers that he was no ordinary man, and that, from his learning, and long
experience as a physician, his opinions and reflections upon "the
pretended art" of man-midwifery are entitled to the greatest respect.
Those who would ridicule his sentiments, and treat his arguments as false
and visionary, and his ideas as antiquated and unsuited to the taste and
advancement of the present day, are those who, from mean and despicable
motives of self-interest, would confirm the vicious system which Roussel
has denounced, and, while destroying woman's modesty, would erect their
own fortune on its ruins.
Towards the end of the preface to the Physical and Moral System of Woman,
will be found the following sentences, which we would commend to the
serious consideration of every man whose sense of decency has not been
altogether obliterated, and whose mind still retains any of those finer
feelings, which God, when he made man in his own image, implanted in the
human breast. "It is not the same, perhaps, with the abuses introduced by
that art, almost unknown among the ancients, which, under the pretence of
assisting nature in producing man, itself sometimes prevents his seeing
the light, in attempting to do that which she unaided could more
effectually perform; which enervates in woman, by effeminacy and the
needless lengthening out of precautions, the instinct, which alone puts
them in a condition to do without it. In fine, which, by a usage, as
indecently as unreasonably repeated in men's attendance upon women,
enfeebles, and at length annihilates the sentiment which most adorns the
sex. I have made some reflections upon this pretended art in the chapter
which treats of natural labour." Again, in the chapter on pregnancy,
Roussel speaks trumpet-tongued, not only against the indelicacy, but of
the absolute inutility of those digital examinations _per vaginam_ now in
vogue, and so dogmatically prescribed in the text books of midwifery.
"As the instant when a woman conceives does not manifest itself in her by
any well characterized expression, and the consequences of this act remain
for some time concealed by a thick veil, that spirit of unrest which
ordains that man, dissatisfied with the present which he may enjoy, should
ever press on towards that future, which he perhaps shall never see,
induces him to seek with eagerness the as yet hidden signs of pregnancy,
and to question nature long before she deigns to speak. Men might, in this
respect, spare themselves the torments of needless impatience, since it
can neither accelerate nor retard its object. It would be much more in
order to wait patiently until the natural signs themselves announce
pregnancy, than that the tentatives by which it is pretended they are
anticipated should annoy women weak enough to submit to them, without
throwing any more light on the motive which suggests a recourse to them.
"These tentatives are the work of a shameless charlatanism, which
solicits them, and which disports itself with chastity and decency, to
establish its empire upon the ruins of a virtue to which the sex owes its
own most solid foundations.
"We here feel ourselves compelled to inform women, that those whom they
employ at this kind of trials deceive them, in affecting a knowledge which
they do not possess. All information derived from _the touch_ is very
uncertain. The concurrence of external and obvious signs can alone be
reckoned on; such as the increased size of the abdomen, the swelling of
the bosom, preceded by qualms, nausea, and suppression of the menses. But
the most decisive of all, by the actual avowal of all men-midwives, the
sole indubitable proof consists in the movements of the infant, which make
themselves felt towards the fourth month of pregnancy. Thus women can
inform themselves better than any one whether they are with child, and the
men-midwives, who are forced themselves to acknowledge this, ought to
erase from their treatises on midwifery the nonsensical rules which they
give upon _the touch_.[33] To give an idea of the solidity and wisdom of
these rules, I need cite but one, taken from a work of one of the most
celebrated men-midwives. 'When one is called on,' says he, 'to examine a
girl by _the touch_ for some suspicion of pregnancy,[34] one ought at
first to introduce the finger with caution, for fear of deflowering her,
if she was not so.' Is not this the very climax of absurdity to be
willing, upon the simple suspicion of an evil which, perhaps, is
imaginary, to produce a real injury, to expose one's self, for the sake of
knowing whether a girl had committed a fault, to the rendering more easy
to her all those which she might commit in future, by destroying the prime
bulwark which in her opposes itself to vice; in fine, to deflower a girl
in order to discover whether she had lost her virginity?[35] And unhappily
again for the rule, the means which it points out are insufficient to
attain the desired information. It is from time alone that this revelation
may be expected. Three or four months of patience will enlighten you more
than can this dangerous practice, the disgraceful essays of which are
worse than the doubts that they would dissipate. Although the
inconveniences of this practice are not so considerable for women as for
girls, we would never do them the injustice to suppose, that it would not
be painful for them to consent to an examination which ought to humiliate
them in their own eyes, and which must sometimes render them contemptible
in the eyes of others: they should free themselves from this torturing
ceremony, though there was no other reason for it than its inutility for
the object which induces them to submit to it."[36] Again, in the chapter
on natural labour, Roussel says:--
"Final causes, which some philosophers would banish as a barren principle
(which is perhaps true in natural philosophy), are in medicine the
foundation of the most solid truths, which the ancients, and above all,
Hippocrates, have transmitted to us. They have perhaps supposed that it
was too trite and too commonplace to think that the Creator, who presided
at the formation of our bodies, had made the mouth to eat, the eyes to
see, and the ears to hear. We know not if it required much effort and
subtle reasoning to divest them of the first ideas of common sense, but it
seems to us, that they who reject altogether final causes discard perhaps
as much truth as those who have most misused them, for it must be owned,
that certain writers have made a strange use of them. Not to travel out of
the subject which occupies us, we may quote M. Astruc,[37] who alleges
that the coverings of the foetus, in engaging themselves at the same
time with it in the orifice of the womb, serve to line that passage, and
to defend it against the bruisings of the foetus, and _the fingers of
the midwife_. To suppose that nature, in arranging the objects which
should assist delivery, had contemplated the awkwardness of male and
female midwives, is to impute to her a foresight which unhappily would be
only too necessary, but that she had little for the errors that we are
able to commit. She has done all for the best in our favour, so much the
worse for us if we mar her work. _It must be_, said the same author,
_that its face (of the foetus) was turned from the side of the os
sacrum, to prevent its nose from being crushed by the bones of the pubes,
and that it might not be suffocated by the waters of the amnios_. A child
that had been living nine months in water to be suffocated, when passing
out of it, by a few drops! O Astruc! have you well considered this?
"Without, then, ascribing to nature frivolous fears, or confining her to
details which she disdains, we may reasonably believe that after having
alloted to different organs destined to aid in generation, the
modifications most suitable to the conception of the child, and its
preservation during pregnancy, she would afford those also which should,
with the least inconvenience, effect its exit from the maternal
bosom."[38]
After describing the process of nature in parturition, Roussel goes on to
say:--"O Rubens! I leave to your pencil the care of expressing that
touching state in which the last impressions of abated pain still tinge
the serenity of purest joy; where the melancholy, caused by sufferings now
terminating, is not yet effaced by the most delightful sentiments which
can animate the soul; where the dread of losing life, natural enough in
suffering, gives place to the delicious pleasure of having presented it
to a new being. But wherefore must it be, that this state is the price of
a train of inconveniences, and a gradation of suffering often
insupportable; and why are we here compelled to envy the kinds of animals
amongst which pregnancy is without embarrassment, and delivery almost
without a pang, or at least exempt from the sad or fatal consequences
which so often follow it in the human species? It would, nevertheless, be
wrong to tax nature with injustice.[39] We yet find races in whom her
primitive impress has never been effaced by the abuses of a refined
society, and amongst whom women enjoy nearly the same privileges as the
females of animals.
"The women of the Ostiaks, it is said,[40] never have any uneasiness about
the time of their delivery, and take none of those precautions which
European effeminacy renders almost indispensable. They are delivered
wherever they may happen to be without any inconvenience; they, or the
persons who assist them, plunge the new-born infant into water or snow,
and the mother returns immediately to her ordinary occupations, or
continues her march, if on a journey.[41] As these people dwell in the
vicinity of the Samoeides,[42] between the fifty-ninth and sixtieth degree
of north latitude, they do not fail to attribute this vigorous
constitution to the severity of the climate.
"Meanwhile, in the same history, we read that the wives of the dwellers in
the island of Amboina, towards the third degree of south latitude, are in
the same category; and the author or compiler of that history, in
reporting the fact, discovers the cause of it in the heat of the climate,
which renders women's members supple and capable of accommodating
themselves with ease to the labours of parturition. One may perceive from
this how versatile are the explanations obtained from _cold_ and _heat_,
and how, in the jargon of mechanicians, causes altogether opposite can
serve with more vraisemblance than actual truth for proof of the same
effect. We repeat again, the effect of manners and custom is not often
enough considered. In all climates nature has given both to man and brute
the faculties necessary for fulfilling the functions of life with ease.
The former has very often perverted their use, believing that
luxuriousness, precautions, and an abundance of all things could supply
their place.
"Without seeking for examples beyond those to which we shall refer, we
might disabuse ourselves of so dangerous an error, if we would compare,
without prejudice, even in our own climate, the women in the rural
districts with those resident in towns. The former, having their attention
continually diverted by their necessary occupations, often find themselves
in the middle of their pregnancy almost without perceiving it, and this is
already a great deal gained. This novel state, without changing anything
in the course of their health, or in their way of living, obliges only
some preparations more necessary for the infant than for themselves.
Arrived at the end of the ninth month (as they are never in a hurry to lie
in) they do not aggravate the troubles which accompany this function by
the anxieties of vexatious expectation. Nature sometimes surprises them in
the midst of the rustic employments in which they are occupied during
their pregnancy, and which only prepare them the better to support those
of labour. Finding in them healthy organs and a calm mind, she operates
without obstruction, and, in consequence, delivers them with less
suffering and more celerity.[43] The consequences of labour, which are, to
the majority of women in towns, in part a real malady, and partly a kind
of etiquette and convention, which subjects them, during a fixed period,
to the regimen of sick persons, when they have ceased to be so, are almost
nothing to women in the country. Nature, having neither caprice nor excess
to combat in them, only occupies herself for their re-establishment; and
as they yield nothing to custom or opinion, they enjoy as much as possible
the favours of nature. They have not time to crawl methodically, during
many weeks, from their bed to a sofa; they have almost always that courage
which increases their powers, and which necessity sometimes gives even to
women resident in towns. Among these even it is by no means rare to see
the wives of poor workmen, who walk to a midwife at the moment of
parturition, and who return the next day free and exempt from accidents,
which the woman of higher rank does not always escape, in the midst of the
studied precautions which are taken on her account; their condition in
life does not permit them to be inconvenienced for more than three or four
days. It seems that nature gives us powers in proportion to the necessity
that we have to make use of them. We have known a young girl who found the
means to conceal from her parents the humiliating signs of her weakness,
and the operation which relieved her from it. As her pregnancy was not
legitimate, she had not the right to be an invalid.[44]
"As for most women in towns, and above all those of the upper classes,
instead of courage capable of annihilating the sentiment of evil, all
concurs to nourish a pusillanimity in them, which renders it more vivid.
The eager curiosity with which they endeavour to find out whether they are
pregnant, the new regimen to which they submit themselves when they are
declared to be so, the preparations, the anxieties, the alarms, real or
feigned, which reign around them, the number of persons who besiege them,
the inaction to which they are condemned, should give them a frightful
idea of their state, and would seem to deprive them of the ability to
make use of their proper powers, and so to render them of no effect. The
feebleness and inertia of their minds, passing to their organs, cannot but
dispose them to a stormy pregnancy, and prepare them for a painful and
sometimes fatal labour. The instinct which watches for the preservation of
our lives, which knows so well how to manage its resources in the most
serious evils, must weaken and lose itself amidst the throng of succours
with which the patients are sometimes overwhelmed. What could it have to
do when so many are acting for it?
"Delivery is an animal function which, in all likelihood, nature had no
desire to render a disease. This function exercises itself almost without
pain and without danger in the brute. In all places where the means of
assisting it have never been reduced to art, women have ordinarily labours
less severe and more fortunate than in those localities which swarm with
accoucheurs and midwives. Whence comes this distinction, if it is not from
the difference of manners and methods of treatment in the one and the
other, or from the abuse which, in the latter places, is made of a
pretended science?
"If the delicacy which results from a luxurious and inactive life renders
the movements of the womb more painful, we should attribute the
irregularity which renders them sometimes fatal to the mother and the
child, to a disordered sensibility, which is excited by attempts almost
always ill-directed, and almost always executed by mischance. It is in
this disturbance that the infant assumes those disadvantageous positions
of which the accoucheurs and midwives unquestionably exaggerate the
danger, to put a higher value on their 'manipulations;'[45] but which, in
effect, render the delivery longer and more laborious: disturbance
maintained and augmented by the embarrassment which the presence of a
number of persons, some dear, others odious, some unknown, who in general
fill the chamber of a woman in labour, must naturally produce, BY THE
TORMENTS OF A MODESTY TOO LITTLE REGARDED, by an air of importance too
much affected, which the assistants, and others who are to operate, throw
over the affair in which they are engaged. All these objects must excite a
variety of sentiments in the woman, which, by distracting her mind,
necessarily disturb the organic action of the parts which should perform
the delivery. Happy is it, if too presumptuous accoucheurs and midwives do
not, by their precocious tentatives, solicit in her a nature which is not
yet prepared to engage itself, precipitate its movements, and consequently
abort the fruit which they ought to await, weary the parts already too
much irritated, and rendered too sensible by the orgasm and tension which
they have suffered, and hurry both mother and child into inevitable ruin.
"Women who have the good fortune not to be annoyed by numerous attendants,
and in whom nothing discomposes nature, are seldom subject to those
catastrophes which, very far from bringing discredit on the operator, who
is often the cause of them, only make him appear the more necessary.
Nature, when she works alone, knows so well how to combine and graduate
her action that she does that only which she ought to do. Ah! why should
she not with ease accomplish an operation for which she has foreseen, and
well prepared everything? Why should she not succeed in extracting with
facility from the centre of the womb, from an active, flexible, and very
vigorous organ, a body which is familiar to it, and which, from its form
and consistence, cannot much injure the parts which it touches? Why should
she be embarrassed in bringing to light an infant whose situation is so
near the outlet through which it is to issue, she whom we have sometimes
seen conducting, without accident, pointed or sharp-edged bodies through
the windings of the urinary ducts, and the tortuous folds of the long
passage of the intestines? There are, besides, operations which she loves
to execute in silence and in secret. This delicate instinct manifests
itself even in some species of animals, which never fulfil certain
functions in presence of witnesses, and fly from the gaze of man to
perform them. Delivery, from its nature, and from all the circumstances
which characterize this function, is one of those which, in the human
species, requires most especially to be covered with a veil. It cannot be
doubted that they would assist her in a way the most efficacious, if the
number of persons in attendance on a woman in labour was limited to two or
three of her most intimate friends, who, by a gay and lively manner,
should divert her from her sufferings, or by their confident appearance
pacify her apprehensions; and to a midwife, whose presence of mind,
patience, reserve, and protection should be a guarantee for her
tranquillity. It is not to be doubted, I say, that a woman would be by
those means more effectually succoured than by the tumultuous assistance
of a number of persons, sorrowful, aghast, impatient, whose multiplied and
often mis-directed attentions magnify in her imagination the evil which
she must endure, and the danger which she fears, and above all by the
awful appearance of a man ever ready to operate, always armed with
suspicious instruments, and to be dreaded from his sex.
"It must be owned that although the midwife's function belongs to the
healing art, it was not intended to be exercised by men.[46] The character
of this function, the small amount of knowledge which it requires, the
entire and absolute confidence which persons of the same sex must
naturally have in each other, in fine, everything demands for it the
agency of women; this employment seems their proper existence; they
possess all the advantages necessary to fulfil it with success. We know
with what address and with what dexterity their hands, small and supple,
glide and insinuate themselves everywhere without annoyance, capable of
penetrating to the very source of the evil without augmenting it, and
conveying the remedy to the part diseased, without awakening, by the act,
pangs which had been allayed.
"It is these precious talents, as well as that delicate attention capable
of divining the wants which there is not strength to express, and that
enlightened sensibility which knows how to regard the very caprices of the
complaint, which gave rise to the proverb, honourable to the sex, that
wheresoever there is a suffering being, his sighs summon woman to console
him.[47]
"They will tell us that long and serious studies, to wit, physics,
mechanics, and even mathematics, are necessary to insure skill in the art
of midwifery. Eh! where is it that they have not introduced, especially of
late, physics and mathematics? All that which is material; all that which
is within the jurisdiction of the senses, belongs, without doubt, to
physics and to mechanics: one could not move a step, one could not lift a
straw, without its being done by the laws of physics; but every one
performs these mechanical operations, as the Bourgeois gentleman did
prose, that is to say, without suspecting it. There are natural mechanics
with which not only all men, but even all animals are acquainted without
having studied them. All perform actions, without having been trained to
them, wherein sparkle the most subtle mechanics; all know of themselves,
and without previous practice, how to assume the most convenient postures
which their different wants demand. Those who compose treatises on
midwifery describe at great length the position which a woman ought to
take during labour, and that which is proper for the accoucheur. The legs
of this latter, say they, ought to describe an angle of _forty-five
degrees_. An operator, to give lustre to his art, may well appeal to that
of mechanics and geometry; but he ought not to say that it is above the
capacity of women. The sole difference which exists, perhaps, between them
is, that a woman, in abandoning herself to her natural dexterity, in
liberating herself from the constraint of a fixed position, and in
effecting the movements which circumstances require, rather than those
which the rule demands, will go about the work better than the man-midwife
gravely moored (_affourche_) at his _angle of forty-five degrees_.
"The art of midwifery, stripped of regulations, useless or of little
moment, and of the frivolous finery wherein it has been arrayed, reduces
itself to a very small number of simple principles,[48] easy to attain,
and most suitable to the capacity of women. They soon learn what are
those faulty positions which the infant may take in the womb: what are
those which they may rectify; and those which, not being remediable, leave
nothing to the address of the operator but the wise resolution to
diminish, as much as possible, their inconveniences.
"Again, it must be considered, that those principles are not to be
applied, excepting in cases wherein nature, insufficient in herself,
demands the assistance of another's hand; for, by the avowal of
accoucheurs themselves, natural labour, which is and ought to be the most
common, can conduct itself without the intervention of art. We may then
conclude, with certainty, that accoucheurs who 'manipulate,' who
instrumentalize us much as they can, most frequently do it without
necessity, and from this cause are prejudicial to the success of the
operation. We may also, in that way, reduce to their just value the
exaggerated details which they give of pretended obstacles which they have
had to overcome, of the address and dexterity which was necessary to
surmount them; details which seem intended to show that the delivery had
been their work, or that, at least, much of it was theirs, and very little
nature's own.[49]
"Either, in the time of the Greeks, women were delivered with greater ease
than now, or they judged better than us of the true degree of influence
that the midwife or the accoucheur possesses in this function. By the
appellation which they gave to their midwives, it appears that they
limited them to the duty of cutting the umbilical cord; they called them
[Greek: omphalotomoi], umbilical cord-cutters. The females of animals
perform this operation with their teeth; and as the umbilical cord can in
their case do without a ligature, there are authors who doubt whether it
is as essential in man as many persons pretend. There are observations for
and against it. This is not the place to discuss this question; but we
believe that they may much deceive themselves if they look upon the
umbilical cord as a simple continuation of the vessels of the child or of
the mother, and not as a fragment of affinity which only serves, for a
certain time, as a point of communication established between the mother
and the infant, that nature retains so long as she requires it, but which
she leaves to decay, and fall away, when it is no longer useful to her.
After the delivery she contracts, compresses, and closes up the part of
the infant to which it adheres; and by intercepting the blood and the life
which gives it subsistence, she soon causes it to wither and dry up,
without any prejudice to the child.
"Although the easiness of the art of midwifery might have been, among the
ancients, a motive for intrusting it to women, they also doubtless had a
regard for natural propriety, which suggested that the infant, on coming
into the world, should be received into the hands of a midwife, to pass
into those of a nurse, and from the hands of the nurse into those of a
governess, who should prepare him to receive from men a masculine
education. A repository so weak and so delicate would perhaps have found,
in the rough and unbending kindness of the latter, aid less adapted to its
state; it required a gentle and yielding support, knowing how to be pliant
as itself, the better to defend it. In fine, the care of infancy is the
destination of women; it is a task which nature has assigned them. It is
woman who must bear the infant during nine months in her womb; _it is
woman who ought to facilitate the means of its exit_; it is woman who
should furnish the first nourishment which it requires; in fine, it is
woman who should keep watch over the first developments of its organs and
of its mind, and prepare it for the lessons which should elevate it to the
condition of man. But the principal reason which, among the ancients,
forbade the belief that the duty of aiding delivery could be proper to any
but women, excepting in cases of very rare occurrence, where every
consideration might necessarily yield to a pressing danger, was the grand
interest of manners.[50] This was an object to which ancient governments
had always special regard.[51] They knew morality to be the foundation of
all legislation, and that good laws would be made in vain, unless good
morals insured their execution. The cruelty of Archagathus' surgical
operations drove the medical men from Rome. She banished also from her
bosom the Greek philosophers and orators, who were accused of having
introduced and cultivated the taste for the arts and vices of Greece. She
would surely not have permitted, for any length of time, the existence of
_an art which, practised by men, would, under the specious pretence of
utility, threaten the sanctuary of marriage_, and which, striking a blow
at the chief safeguard of families, would next attack the mainsprings of
the state; an art which, _with power to alarm the modesty of women, would
soon leave them without a blush_, and cause them to lose even the
recollection of that severe virtue which had merited the respect and
veneration of the Romans, and which of old had been the principle of the
grandest revolutions. Cato, always careful to protect the hearts of the
citizens from corruption, would never have permitted their wives, when
presenting children to the republic, to tarnish the favour by a
forgetfulness of the first of all decencies. All nations were sufficiently
agreed, up to the middle of the last century, never to admit the agency of
men in delivery. M. Astruc[52] alleges that it was not until 1663 that
they began at court to make use of a man-midwife, and this was, say they,
on one of those occasions when honour in danger takes counsel but from the
perplexity which misleads it, and violates one part of its rules to save
the other. Who would believe it? It was shame which compelled recourse,
for the first time, to men. A king, who knew the force of example on the
throne, and who wished to conceal his weaknesses, and to be tender of the
delicacy of her who shared them, believed that he could not place in
better hands an interest so dear. It is thus that Jupiter sometimes
confided to the inferior gods, rather than to the goddesses, his
embarrassments, and the care of concealing from the eyes of Juno the
fruits of his infidelities. Whatever it might be, _unquestionably it was
not in a tranquil moment that a woman could, for the first time, make up
her mind to abandon herself to the mercy of a man to deliver her_. The
first examples having been given by those persons whose rank and condition
carried opinion with them, the usage of men-midwives is since extended
and spread with that rapidity which is common to all inventions of
luxury, although even physicians[53] are themselves forced to expose its
inconveniences."[54]