MANY English and French authors have given us a long enumeration of the causes which may make deliveries difficult and laborious. The curious may have recourse to them; as for me, who have not proposed to myself here a treatise compleat on all points, I shall content myself with setting forth only what tends to fullfil my proposed aim, that is to say, to take notice of those principal points, which first moved insufficient midwives to call in surgery to their assistence, to remedy their blunders, to retrieve their mischief, or to repair their omissions. I shall consider the kinds of exigencies, which the men-operators seized for a pretext of employing their iron and steel-instruments, the use of the natural hand, being yet more unknown to them than to the meanest midwife, and by this means, for the cure of confessedly a great evil, obtruded an infinitely greater one, and more extensive, in every sense, and in every point of light, that of men taking the practical part of midwifery into their own hands, or rather into their artificial ones of iron and steel, from which they derive all the authority of their introduction in the character of men-midwives. THE labors then which are generally speaking looked on the most nice, and arduous, may be comprized under the following heads. 1st. THE obliquity of the uterus or womb. 2dly. THE extraction of the head of the fœtus severed from the body, and which shall have remained in the uterus. 3dly. THAT labor in which the head of the fœtus remains hitched in the passage, the body being intirely come out of the uterus. 4thly. WHEN the head of the fœtus presents itself foremost, but sticks in the passage. TO these I shall add the case of the pendulous belly, which is not without its difficulty. OF all these classes of labors I shall treat separately. But before I proceed on them, I presume, that it may not be improper preliminarily to corroborate what I have said of the intrusion of the men into the practice of a profession, of the essential part of which they were so ignorant and disqualified for it, by the testimony which one of the best men-midwives in Europe has not refused to the truth.