MR. De la Motte, in his 188th OBSERVATION, p. 265, _Leyden ed._ makes an animadversion upon a midwife’s _touching_ a patient, which, unless he was induced to it by that spirit of injustice to midwives in general, against which injustice all his usual candor is sometimes not proof, would persuade me, that he was more ignorant of the nature and ends of _touching_, than what his works show him to have been in other parts of the profession. IN that OBSERVATION he gives you the case of a woman in labor, to whom he was called, whose membranes a midwife had prematurely broke, whom she had actually over-fatigued with making her too often shift her posture, and also with incessant and reiterated TOUCHINGS (_attouchemens qu’elle reïteroit sans relâche_) and all this, from a principle of avarice, in order to make the quicker riddance, for the sake of attending a richer patient, where she expected greater gain; “as if (says Mr. De la Motte, in words that ought to be engraved in every practitioners heart) a poor woman was more to be neglected than a wealthy one, in the presence of a God who judges all our actions.” FOR my quoting this case, especially as it regards the point of TOUCHING now under discussion, my reason, from the considerations to which it will give rise in the reader’s own mind, will probably appear so satisfactory to him, that he will easily absolve me of any charge of digression. AS to the midwife’s bringing on the premature discharge of the waters, if the fact was true: it was very blameable practice. It is a practice that all capable midwives reprove and forbid, as it is robbing the part of the most natural and necessary lubrication for facilitating the launch in due time of the fœtus. I have been assured, with what truth I cannot well warrant, that the men-practitioners are commonly much too precipitate in the breaking of the membranes. Be the practitioners then of what sex they may, such practice is bad.