“REFLEXION. Here was a _delivery_ in intention, but the execution had something horrid, and perfectly odious in it. I never could have imagined, that two men could have pulled in this manner, without dislocating the bones of the woman into whom the crotchet had been struck: for so it was shown to be, upon the body being opened, in which the child was found with an arm plucked off, entangled in the umbilical chord round its neck, without the least mark of the crotchet upon its body: too plain a proof this of the crotchet having been struck into the mother and not the child, and consequently of the little circumspection, not to say rage, with which the surgeon had acted upon the body of this unhappy creature: for surely it must be granted, that it could be no part of the child that could have resisted the terrible efforts made both by master and man, jointly to bring it away; and yet this was one of the BEST[30] operators in the country for HELPING women in labor. “I COULD make a VOLUME of these histories, if they were good for any thing but to excite horror.” Such is the witness born by M. De la Motte, as to the _ablest_ men-midwives of his time, in all his province. Now in order to invalidate the conclusion, so natural to be drawn from so unexceptionable an attestation, against the superiority of the practice of the men to that of the women, will it be said, that the men-practitioners, in this country, are in general better educated than such operators as have been above shown? If so great a falsity should be advanced, let the reader himself reflect on what he may easily find to be the common method of training up of men-pupils in this art. I have in the first part of this work, stated some reasons for their insufficiency, both in study and practice; and the more this point is examined, the more clear will that undoubted truth appear, that if the ignorant midwives are, as they undoubted are, a great evil, they are even blessings in comparison to the generality of the men-practitioners, bred up with the help of artificial Dolls, pretty prints, or even of their personal visitation of those miserable wretches hired, or under the mask of charity, forced to undergo, from apprentices or pupils, so many inhuman tortures and outrages in vain.