I ANSWER then to these instrumentarians, that an instrument, even, no more dangerous than a probe, would in so tender a place as I am treating of, not perhaps be quite enough exempt from a possibility of doing mischief, to deserve an exception: but as to those instruments, which are so palpably likely to hurt both mother and child, to injure, in short, or even to destroy both the mould and the cast, they are all of them within the case of exception, or rather exclusion. It is then, in knowing what to do, and in the faculty of operating with the hand according to that knowledge, that the art of midwifery principally consists. If instruments are deemed ingenious, the doing without them is surely not less so. NOW as to the case proposed in this section, that of a child’s head stuck in the passage, I aver, that it is not absolutely impossible to terminate this delivery by the hand. I AM even ready to demonstrate this before any competent judges. I speak by experience. I have hitherto executed with all desirable success this operation without any aid but that of the hand, with a little patience and proper assiduity. I have many and many a time seen it practised at the Hôtel Dieu, and elsewhere. I never in my whole course of practice saw sufficient reason for attempting so hazardous an extraction, as that which is executed by means of a tire-tête. Why then those needless terrors, those superfluous tortures with instruments, to women already in too much pain and anguish? care enough could not be taken to spare those of the weaker-nerved sex in that condition such horrors, the very idea of which, to say no more, is enough to put them into imminent peril of their lives. All the forceps, and the rest of the chirurgical apparatus, especially the more complex instruments, very justly frighten the women, and their friends and assistents for them. Their introduction requires at once a painful, a shocking, and a needless devarication. The patients are put into attitudes capable of making them die with apprehension, if not with shame, from that native modesty of theirs, which, in these cases, may however be pronounced rather a wise instinct than a virtue. HOW much preferable is the true midwife’s practice, who will have oftenest prevented, by her knowledge and skill, this very situation! That is to say, if she has been called in time. She knows how to predispose the passages, and by gentle reductions to restore Nature to her right road, where she has been through mispractice driven out of it, or through negligence suffered to deviate from it, or not preventively watched. I HAVE never but seen, with respect to the uterus in this case, that it was possible to insinuate first one finger, then another, and little by little the whole hand, not indeed a hard hand, as big as a shoulder of mutton, the hand of some lusty he-midwife, but of a midwife, such as it is commonly seen.