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
equal the excellence in it of the women, Great Nature’s chosen
instruments for this work: an excellence by them attained with scarce
any learning at all, or at least of that abstruse theoretical sort, on
which the men make their superiority principally depend.
BUT that I may not herein be taxed of maintaining any thing that has
only the air of a paradox, or of begging the question, I shall
implicitly, in the course of my answer to the following objection,
endeavor to remove any remaining doubt on this head.
OBJECTION the Eleventh.
IN like manner, as there are particular parts of the human body which
have their appropriate undertakers or protectors under their proper
distinctive names, as oculists, dentists, and corn-cutters, who by
making respectively one part their particular care and study, arrive at
a greater perfection, at least in the practical operations on it, than
regular physicians or surgeons, whose object is the whole fabric; Why,
by parity of reasoning, should not the men-practitioners in midwifery be
preferable to the midwives, since a man has to his manual function
superadded a theory superior to that of the women, who, it is confessed,
stand sometime in need of calling in the physician to their assistence?
As a man then will have laid in a stock of medical knowledge, peculiarly
adapted to the exigencies and disorders incident to women during their
pregnancy and lying-in, he must consequently excel the midwife, or the
physician singly considered; he who with so much greater convenience
will have united in one person both their faculties, besides that of the
surgeon.
ANSWER.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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