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
History
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
AS to the reproach which Mr. Smellie makes to us of being interested, I
can, for myself, prove that I have delivered gratuitously, and in pure
charity, above nine hundred women. I doubt much, whether our critic can
say as much, unless he reckons it for a charity, that which he exercised
on his automaton or machine, which served him for a model of instruction
to his pupils. This was a wooden statue, representing a woman with
child, whose belly was of leather, in which a bladder full, perhaps, of
small beer, represented the uterus. This bladder was stopped with a
cork, to which was fastened a string of packthread to tap it,
occasionally, and demonstrate in a palpable manner the flowing of the
red-colored waters. In short, in the middle of the bladder was a
wax-doll, to which were given various positions.
BY this admirably ingenious piece of machinery, were formed and started
up an innumerable and formidable swarm of men-midwives, spread over the
town and country. By his own confession, he has made in less than ten
years nine hundred pupils, without taking into the account the number of
midwives whom he has trained up, and formed in so miraculous a manner.
See the preface of this author. He speaks of his _machine_ in the first
page, and p. 5, of the number of his pupils.
NOW as to these worthy pupils, must not they be finely enabled to judge
of the situation of women with child, and of that of their fœtus? Must
not they be deeply skilled in that branch of anatomy? Must not they
acquire a habit of the touch exquisitely nice, exquisitely just, for
discerning the proportion and analogy between a mere wooden machine, and
a body, sensible, delicate, animated, and well organized?
I HOPE too that it is an injustice done to that doctor, by those who say
that his pupils have too often a way of hurrying out the waters, which
can only serve to render the labor more dry, consequently more
laborious, and by that means furnish a handle for setting their
instruments to work. If this should be so, as once more I hope it is
not, may not the bad habit they will have contracted during their
pupilship, of drawing the small-beer out of their wooden-woman, have
contributed to this method of practice?
IN the mean time, does it become a doctor to call us interested, who
himself, for three guineas in nine lessons, made you a man-midwife, or a
female one, by means of this most curious machine, this mock-woman?
OBJECTION the Eighth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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