THIS folly has even sometimes gone so far, that when a woman has, through a man-midwife’s mispractice, suffered perhaps a wrong, so deep as to be disqualified for ever after for being a mother, or had a fine child, literally speaking, murdered (_secundum artem_ indeed) he has, what with scientific jargon, through the cloud of which it was impossible for persons unversed in the matter to discern the truth, what with an air of importance, and what with especially her own weak prepossession in favor of the superiority of men to women-practitioners, known how to impose on her the most atrocious injury for so great a service as that of saving life is for ever held. The deceived patient then thinks she cannot thank him too much, nor reward him sufficiently for what he could be scarce punished enough, if proportionably to the mischief he had done; and to which his mis-representations have perhaps even made herself innocently an accomplice. THIS indeed is easily to be accounted for. A pregnant woman must especially, in the moment of her labor-pains, think herself too much in the power of the operator, to whom she has trusted herself, to dispute his judgment. She may even, and that is probably oftenest the case, have too good an opinion of it, to dispute it. Her labor is severe, and, as before observed, severe, or at least the more so, very likely from some fault of his. Her deliverance lingers; Nature, from some vice of conformation, or defect of art in her assistent, appears faint, remiss, insufficient, in short, in her expulsive efforts; in the mean time, the pains of the patient grow more and more intense and intolerable: the man-midwife, either perplexed or impatient, or not knowing what better to do, has recourse to those fatal instruments, with which the odds are so great, that he will gall, bruise, or irreparably wound the child, or the mother[12]. In some cases indeed, he may take the dreadful advantage of the mother’s agonies of pain, to use those instruments, and do her a mischief she may not just then feel, from the pain of the operation being absorbed in the greater one; to use them, I say, unobserved by her[13].