A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a MidwifeNihell, Elizabeth
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A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery: Setting Forth Various Abuses Therein, Especially as to the Practice With Instruments: the Whole Serving to Put All Rational Inquirers in a Fair Way of Very Safely Forming Their Own Judgement Upon the Question; Which It Is Best to Employ, in Cases of Pregnancy and Lying-in, a Man-midwife; Or, a Midwife
Nihell, Elizabeth
Midwifery -- Early works to 1800; Obstetrics -- Early works to 1800
AND surely never was a time, when children more required the
intercession of humanity in their favor. Mothers can speak for
themselves. But the poor infants, so often precluded, by violence, from
the pity-moving faculty of their own cry, have nothing but the cry of
Nature to plead for them. A cry, the listening to which is prevented by
those vain imaginary terrors, inspired by designing Art in the service
of Interest, through which Nature is seduced to act against herself, and
deliver herself up to her greatest enemies.
IN short, one would imagine, that all the rage of cruelty was unchained,
and let loose against especially those tender innocents, born or unborn.
AMONG the poor, particularly as to those infants cast upon the public
charity, a barbarously premature ablactation, under a pretext so easily
foreknown to be as false as it is fatal, of bringing them up by hand for
cheapness-sake, has destroyed incredible numbers.
AMONG the rich, or those able enough to pay for the learned murder of
their offspring, how many of their children, even before they have well
got hold of life, in this, literally speaking as to them, iron age,
encounter their death or wounds, stuck in the brain by a crotchet, or
crushed by a forceps, to say nothing of their being now and then
ingeniously strangled in the noose of a fillet!
AND those horrors proceed unchecked and unexploded, and in what a
nation? a nation, that values herself upon the distinction of profound
thinking: a nation that, besides that interest she has in common with
all other well-governed nations, to protect and promote population,
stands, be it said, in that true spirit of justice, which as much
disdains to pay a fulsome compliment, as good sense ever will to receive
it, moreover eminently distinguished above them all, for producing a
race of natives, one would think could hardly be too numerous, since
they are the most remarkable in the known world for courage, for
personal beauty, and for many other liberal gifts of Nature, among which
surely not the least is, that inborn spirit of liberty, to which they
owe the honorable acquisition of so many additional advantages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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