INSTEAD then of the dangerous self-sufficiency of these complex smatterers, you have in a plain midwife, supposing her regularly bred, and duly qualified for her profession (for I am no more an advocate for ignorance in the women than in the men) one, who, being called in time, will duly consider, and observe the constitution of the person that wants her assistence. If nothing appears extraordinary, or out of the common-rules in her patient’s constitution and conformation, she needs only lay down for her the previous course of management, and as the hour of delivery approaches predispose her properly: a point in which the men must be grossly deficient, for want of that skill of prognostic inherent to the women, from their particular delicacy and shrewdness in the _faculty of touching_; upon which more depends than can be well imagined. Wherever a case occurs to a midwife, so complicated as to be above her reach, her interest, her reputation, her duty, all conspire to prescribe to her a timely application to a regular physician. She communicates her doubts or difficulties to him, who, at the same time that he receives a just information from her of the state of things, combines it with his own knowledge of the human constitution. He does not confound, as the man-midwife does, ideas so different as those of the manual operation, and the medicinal prescription. The object of the physician, being the same as that of the midwife, the prevention or alleviation of pain to the mother, and the greatest safety to the mother and child, but preferentially that of the mother; there is this advantage to both mother and child, that all harshness of practice, all the violenter remedies will be as much corrected as can be done, consistent with the safety of mother and child, by the midwife’s tenderness, by which the physician will at the same time be above the being misled into omissions of any thing absolutely requisite. In short, on such occasions, they serve to temper one another. A truly great physician will not disdain the lights furnished him by her practical experience, and she knows the bounds of her mechanical duty and profession too well, to interfere with his superior intellectual province, in those points submitted to it. A pragmatical man-midwife, on the strength of his miserable half-learning, would think it a derogation from his character, to call in a physician in supplement to his deficiency, of which he is always ashamed, though indeed he has sometimes the excuse of himself not knowing it. Then when a fatal accident has happened, under his hands, against which, with more knowledge he might have guarded, or which with less of presumption or dependence on himself he might have prevented, by procuring previous or collateral advice; he thinks himself abundantly acquitted by laying the blame on _occult causes_. Even the great man-midwife, _Mauriceau_ himself, has made use of that trite exploded apology[7]: where he