HAPPY! thrice happy it is for the midwives, that, at least, if avarice should tempt any of them to the injustice of hurrying a poor patient’s delivery, in order to attend a rich one; a circumstance which, I fancy however, does not more often occur to the female than to the male-practitioners; the woman cannot, at least, use towards precipitating such deliveries means so violent as the men. They appear only in guise of peaceable simple seconds to Nature: the men take the field, armed as combatants against her. The women can but prematurate things by excitation of the hand; they may be guilty of reprehensible negligence, they may be over curious in their bandages, by way of smoothing wrinkles after delivery; in short, they may commit many faults, which I am far from justifying, or even extenuating; but at the very worst, I defy them to equal the instrumentarians in mischief; nor can their practice abound with those horrors, of which a man-midwife tells us he could furnish VOLUMES (p. 298.) horrors which must be so greatly multiplied since his time, as the recourse to instruments is more than ever pursued, in practice, though so fallaciously disowned in the theory; under which disavowal the gentlemen midwives figuratively conceal their bag of hard-ware, just as Dr. Smellie directs them literally to do in their visits to patients. BUT to resume the subject of TOUCHING, I am to observe, that among its essential services on many occasions, both during the pregnancy, and in the actual labor-pains, there is one case, which, for its frequency and importance, deserves a separate consideration: it is that of the obliquity of the uterus, of which touching not only serves to inform, but to rectify it. I shall therefore dedicate a section to the treating of it. Of the OBLIQUITY of the UTERUS. BY the obliquity of the uterus I mean its untoward situation. For either the uterus preserves its natural direction, or does not preserve it. Where the uterus preserves it, I call it well placed: the point of it is turned directly to the cavity of the pelvis, and the _fundus uteri_ is suspended in the space between the umbilical region and the vertebræ: if the uterus does not preserve its natural direction, if it inclines too much forwards, backwards, or towards either the right or the left side, I call it oblique, or untowardly placed. All the other situations of the uterus are reducible to these four, from which they differ no otherwise than as its line that should naturally be perpendicular to that of the vagina deviates more or less from it towards any of them. It is from this obliquity, greater or less, that proceeds, by much the most often, the greater or the less difficulty of the lyings-in.