A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a MidwifeNihell, Elizabeth
History
A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a Midwife
Nihell, Elizabeth
Midwifery -- Early works to 1800; Obstetrics -- Early works to 1800
IN some you see all distempers of women collateral to their pregnancy,
which is certainly a very necessary and an infinitely extensive subject,
while on the practical article of the deliverance they give you nothing
but what is barren, jejune, or even false. Others, by way of filling up,
run digressively into a discussion of the methods of treating infants.
Others again have written only to recommend some pretended secrets, as
powders, preparations, &c. Some have swelled their volumes with the more
or less commodious structure of a couch, or the mechanism of a
close-stool, or the make of different sorts of syringes for anodine
injections. In others you meet with remedies for the deformities of the
human body, for the contractions or stiffnesses of the muscles of the
shoulders, arms, hands, legs, feet, thighs, haunches, &c. to straiten
the crooked, and even, in a treatise on midwifery, to extirpate a
polypus from the nose. Others, with all the parade of justly exclaiming
against nostrum-mongers, the plausible writing against which serves at
once to fill up, and give them an air of superiority to such trumpery,
substitute however nothing better of their own than the recommendation
of some instrument, which they give you for a master-piece of invention;
and to establish which, they cry down every instrument of other
practitioners, though not one jot inferior to it in any thing, but the
not being the newest. Thus, after having perused such a multiplicity of
authors, it is incredible to say how little true, or practically useful
knowledge is to be picked out of the whole mass of them. You find almost
every thing in them but what you are looking for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account