DEIGN then, for your own sakes, to examine it by that light of Reason, the spring of which is for ever in yourselves. It cannot fail of affording you a sufficient certainty on which to rest your opinion, in a point upon which it is of such deep, such tender importance to you, not to form your resolutions on a wrong one. In virtue of such your own fair examination, the decision will no longer be dangerously and precariously that of others for you, no longer be nothing better than a lightly adopted prejudice, but become truly and meritoriously the genuine result of your own judgment. BUT whatever your decision may be, at least to me you can hardly impute it as an offence, my seeking to supply you with matter, whereon to exercise that judgment of yours in so interesting a point. At the worst, I have the consolation of being in my duty, while thus aiming, however deficiently, at proving that with the most tender regard and unfeigned zeal. I am, respectfully, Your most devoted, and most faithful humble servant, ELIZABETH NIHELL. Haymarket, Feb. 21, 1760. [Illustration] PREFACE. THE preservation of so valuable a part of the human Species as pregnant women, as well as that of their dear and tender charge, their children, so powerfully recommended by the voice of Nature and Reason, to all possible human providence for their safe birth, forms an object so sensibly intitled to the private and national care, and even to that of universal society, that all enforcement of its importance would be an injury to the human understanding, or at least to the human heart. It would look too like imagining that it could be wanted. WHAT I have then to say preliminarily, must chiefly arise from my own due sense of my inequality to the subject of which I presume to treat. Though, if example could be any countenance, I might plead that of so many authors who have, with the utmost confidence and the utmost absurdity, written upon the art of midwifery, without understanding any thing at all of it. The truth is, that my very natural and strong attachment to the profession, which I have long exercised and actually do exercise, created in me an unsuppressible indignation at the errors and pernicious innovations introduced into it, and every day gaining ground, under the protection of Fashion, sillily fostering a preference of men to women in the practice of midwifery: a preference first admitted by credulous Fear, and admitted without examination, upon the so suspicious recommendation of those interested to make that Fear subservient to their selfish ends.