“A GENTLEMAN who lived upon his fortune, without professing surgery, though he had served his time to it, and had even formerly exercised it, not only in France, but in Italy, and in other foreign countries, told me, in conversation, that he had an infallible remedy to make a woman bring forth instantaneously, however lingering and difficult her labor might naturally be. Of this, he said, he had made undoubted experiments, and that he had obtained this secret from an Italian, under oath of not disclosing it to any one. He was more than a little surprized at finding me without curiosity to learn from him this pretended secret, which he imagined must concern me so much, as one who made open prefession of the obstetrical art; and still greater was his surprize at seeing me change the subject, without any sign of attention to what he had been saying on this head.” “IN process of time, he married, and his wife being pregnant was got into the time of her labor-pains towards delivery. It became now expedient for him to declare this famous secret to me, which was no other than half a drachm of borax in a glass of any innocent liquid agreeable to the palate of the patient. But as this dose happened to be administered by one who had no sort of faith in it, it had no effect: his wife lay four days and four nights in labor; the child died the moment after it was born, and the mother narrowly escaped following it.” _Observation_ 176, (of M. De la Motte) “AS I was at Caën, a town of Normandy, attending the lying-in of a lady there, an old stander of a practitioner of that place, and a man of good abilities, told me, that he had been lately sent for to a woman who had continued several days in labor, with slow and moderate pains. As he found the fœtus well situated, he made the patient take an infusion of three drachms of sena in the juice of a Seville orange, in order to quicken the throws and advance the delivery, which indeed came on ten or twelve hours afterwards, but the woman died, one may say, immediately after it. “TO this account (continues M. De la Motte) I opposed, for answer, that being at Bayeux, on the like occasion, an old practitioner in surgery of that place, in conjunction with whom I had been called to visit a patient, told me, in conversation, that he understood midwifery very well, that he had even, not long before terminated a delivery given over by another surgeon; that the child, one arm of which hung out, was dead, before he put his hand to it, and that the mother, though well delivered, died soon after.”