repugnance, I will not say only by a modest woman, but by any woman at all. And the truth is, that there can be few men in the world, but what, the more tender lovers they are of the women, but must be only the more disgusted, the more impatient of the midwife’s preparatory part of her office, which is however the most important one, both as to the prevention of pain, and to the safety of the delivery. BUT even where those preparatory offices have been omitted, or at best perfunctorily performed by a man-midwife, and where the actual function in the crisis of labor has been deficient, or at best indifferent, the labor may still have proceeded, and the patient delivered with only more pain, than she would probably have suffered under a good midwife’s hands. What follows then? Why this; that the patient in the transport of joy at her delivery from pains which are hardly ever but great, even though much less than her fear had magnified them to her; instead of gratitude to that Nature, which can constitute to her only a vague object of the mind, her weak imagination gives to the assistent man-midwife, a more palpable being, as he is of flesh and blood, the merit of a deliverance, in which he had most probably no other share, than its being his fault that it was not yet less painful than she has found it. But this is not at all. What sounds towards a paradox, and yet is strictly true, is, that the more pain the patient has endured, through the man-midwife’s fault, the greater will her gratitude be to him. The reason is as obvious as it is natural. Herself not knowing, nor having perhaps any idea of what ought to have been done for her more perfect relief, she will have no conception that the man has omitted any thing: she will give him credit for what he has _appeared_ to do for her; and measure her sense of acknowledgement by the pain from which she will suppose he has helped to rid her; and in her joy at her delivery would think it even an ingratitude to listen to suggestions from others, or even from herself, that should tend to diminish, explain away, or may be reduced to less than nothing, the benefit she so vainly imagines was his work.