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
BUT where there is a complicated case, dependent on the physician’s art,
then the trusting to those men-dabblers in midwifery is a folly that may
be fatal to both mother and child, or, at the best, the delivery will
have been rendered more painful, more laborious, more big with danger,
for those precautions having been neglected, which can be so little
supposed to occur to the common run of men-midwives in cases foreign
from their rote of practice. Yet it is precisely in those disorders
collaterally contingent to pregnancy, and no disorder does that state
exclude, that the greatest skill and knowledge of physic are required.
Then it is, that not only the preservation of the mother claims regard,
and certainly the preferable one, but even that of the child is no
indifferent point. And to save both, the state of the mothers
constitution must be carefully considered. Thus the combination of the
disease with the pregnancy, the due regard to the mother as well as that
to the child, form a triple object that takes in a compass of
comprehension to which no midwife will pretend, nor can be imagined to
exist in the mere man-practitioner of midwifery. Such a nicety of
observation does not seem to be the province of a manual operator, and
indeed useless to him in that character. And as he will be more likely
to trust to conjectures, which no sufficient grounds of study will have
justified his presuming to trust, he must oftener take the part of the
disease than of the patient. It is well if sometimes, disconcerted at
the excess of a danger of which he does not understand the origin or
nature, he does not, in default of the head, employ the hand, and engage
the mother in a premature or forced delivery of the child, to the
imminent hazard of the lives of both. Now comes the chirurgical
operation in play; and we shall now see, that the ingraftment of the
surgeon upon the midwife, deserves equally at least reprobation with
that of the physician.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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