“TO the shame (says M. de la Motte) of the profession they exercise, they have no guide but their avarice, while the grossest ignorance of the art of midwifery itself is their lot. Such are much to be dreaded by women in difficult labor; for (adds he) they having no help to offer them but that of their instruments, they employ them indifferently in all the situations in which the fœtus presents. Nay, even the hands of some who will use their hands, are not less dangerous when misconducted. The ignorant therefore should never meddle with lyings-in. It would save them from the reproach they may incur of murder, in undertaking what they cannot execute, and what surpasses their skill. They would not furnish _scenes_ that make one _shudder_ with _horror_. “I SPEAK here of so many poor women, whose strength shall have been exhaust—by a great loss of blood, caused by the violences which an ignorant man-midwife shall have made them suffer, I speak of women, whose parts shall have been all bruised, and so vilely treated and torn, as in some to lay the anus and vagina into one, besides their children being dismembered, some their arms or legs plucked off, others the whole body, the head being left behind in the uterus.” THIS is the language of a man-midwife himself, who candidly declaims against the errors of his fellow-practitioners, undoubtedly without designing that such their errors should be wrested into an objection to the practice of that art being committed to the men. Such a conclusion would in me be unfair, and a vain attempt to impose on the reader the laudable condemnation of an abuse, for an indiscriminate reproach to the whole set of men-midwives. This would however be but a kind of retaliative treatment of those, who, from the defective practice of the ignorant and unskilful midwives, of which if there was no more than one in the world, that one would be much too many, take the unjust handle of inveighing against midwives in general. EVEN la Motte himself, who, as I have before with pleasure observed, was really as capable a man in the profession of midwifery as a man can be, at least to judge of him by his writings, has embraced every occasion of boasting the superiority of the men to the women in the exercise of midwifery. But while he taxes men of _scenes_ that make one _shudder_ with _horror_, the mistakes he imputes to the women, which are bad enough in all conscience, are not however of that atrocious nature, as those he relates of the men. Nay, with all his desire of under-rating the women, he falls into even pitiful contradictions. Let the reader himself decide on the following one.