NOTWITHSTANDING likewise the veneration confessedly due to Hippocrates, I cannot dispense myself from saying the truth; he might be and doubtless was an excellent physician: he has wrote upon all the female disorders, and on the means of delivering them; he may have been consulted in his time, but he can never pass for an able man-midwife. His writings contain some violent remedies and strange prescriptions for women in labor, which must be the produce of the most dangerous ignorance of what is proper for them in that condition. THIS author was also evidently ignorant of what concerns preternatural deliveries, as indeed were his successors till the beginning of the last century. TO prove what I advance, there needs no recourse back to very remote times: it will be sufficient to peruse the treatises of Ambrose Paræus, Jacques Guillemeau, Peter-Paul Bienassis, printed 1602, and even that of De la Motte, who is of this century, to own, that the practice of the men-midwives was far from having attained any degree of perfection. THE manner in which the antients proceeded, when the child presented in an untoward situation, is a fully convincing proof thereof; since they obstinately, in such cases, continued their efforts to reduce it to its natural situation, in spite of a thousand difficulties and dangers, instead of bringing it away footling, as is now done by all who understand the right practice. HIPPOCRATES is the first who discovered that wonderful secret of killing the child, and bringing it away piece-meal from the mother’s womb. He advises it, in the manner taken notice of by Dr. Smellie, in his introduction, (page 10. & seq.) I do not know whether it is from that branch of practice that he adopts him for “the father of midwifery” (p. 4.) but, what is certain is, that Galen, and all the successors of Hippocrates, till towards the end of the last century, exactly followed his method of not delivering women in hard labors, but by the means of murderous instruments. I shall not here detain myself with rehearsing the long legend Mr. Smellie gives us of all the authors who have written on this subject to the time of Ambrose Paræus; time when to the progresses made by the midwives of the Hôtel Dieu at Paris in the art of midwifery, it was owing, that the surgeons, guided by their superior lights, made some greater progress towards perfection. THAT the reader however may not suspect me of exaggeration, or over-straining points, I request of him to suspend his judgment, to have the patience to hear me out to the end, and he will find, that I have here advanced nothing but what in the sequel stands clearly and manifestly proved. OBJECTION the Fourth. IN a word, the manual operation of midwifery is an art, a science, and as such consequently more competently to be professed by men, than by women. It is making the art cheap, say the moderns, to allow the practice of it to women.