HAVE not some of our modern authors, especially the male-practitioners, who in these later times have treated of midwifery, added new and worse errors of their own to those bequeathed to us by the antients, whom they have insulted, as they themselves will probably one day be, but with more reason, by their successors, if the world should continue blind enough for them to have any in this profession? One would even imagine, that in the criticisms in which they indulge themselves of one another’s systems and instruments, they are inflicting part of the punishment due for their common offences against Nature, in the abuse of an Art, originally intended to assist her. At the same time, even from their own showing, nothing can be plainer, than that their boasted inventions have, under the specious pretence of improvement, fallen from bad to worse, as is ever the case of superstructures on the crazy foundation of false principles. READ the men-writers on this art, and you will find interspersed in most of them, amidst the most flagrant proofs of their own ignorance of it, reproaches to that of the midwives, too just, perhaps as to some, but shamelessly absurd in them, who to that ignorance substitute their own subtilities of theory, which, when reduced to practice, are infinitely worse than any deficiency in some particular female-practitioners; being mostly, in truth, fit for nothing so much, as to prepare dreadful work for their instruments. BUT if they so falsely exalt their own learning above the ignorance of women; they have their reason for it. They seek to drive out of the practice those who stand in the way of their private interest: that private interest, to which the public one is for ever sacrificed under the specious and stale pretext of its advancement. CAN it then be wrong in any of our sex and profession to endeavour, at least, to justify ourselves, and to undeceive the public, of the ill and false impressions which have been given it of our talents and ability? Pernicious prejudices have sometimes their run, like epidemical distempers: and surely it is more for the service of mankind, that their duration should be shortened, than suffered to proceed without at least an endeavour to oppose them. I SHOULD, however, be much more pleased with an exemption from the disagreeable task of composing the apology of our sex in this matter, it being contrary to that modesty which becomes us so well; but as the men-midwives, in their system of exalting their powers of Art over ours of Nature, keep no measures with truth, I see myself forced to do justice to our function, and to manifest the unreasonableness of that contempt, with which they treat and depreciate our services; and with which they have, in favor of their own interest, perhaps too successfully imbued the public.