BUT to that conclusion in favor of the men-midwives, from the supposed superiority of their success to that of the women-practitioners, contained in the objection I am now answering, I have further to oppose an argument drawn from _matter of fact_, to which I should imagine it difficult to find a satisfactory reply. This argument then consists in a fair appeal to Experience herself. I HAVE before observed, that in the Hôtel-Dieu at Paris, there are no men-practitioners suffered, for I do not include the surgeon-major, who is absolutely no more than an officer for the form-sake. Consequently there are no instruments ever employed in the delivery of the women admitted to that hospital. It is true they are extremely well taken care of; all necessaries are found them by that noble charity; but yet it cannot be thought, that the same abundance of ease and conveniences can be afforded, as by those persons, generally speaking, who employ men-midwives. This distinction I mention for the sake of the allowance justly to be made in the calculate I am about to propose. Notwithstanding however the superiority in this point on the side of men-midwives practice, notwithstanding the grief of mind from various causes, as well as the bad constitution of the bodies of many of those indigent wretches, prior to the reception into that hospital, notwithstanding other easily conceivable disadvantages; notwithstanding all these, I say, take any given number of patients, delivered purely by the midwives of that hospital, without the intervention of one man-practitioner, and especially without instruments, and to that given number, oppose an equal one of women attended from the first of their labor to their delivery by the men-midwives, and see on the side of which sex, in the operators, there will be found the greater number of those who shall have done well, or suffered least. I AM the more emboldened to propose such an experiment from my own certain knowledge. I have seen more than two thousand women delivered under my eyes, at the Hôtel-Dieu at Paris, some of whose cases must be readily imagined to have been severe or preternatural ones. Yet all of them were delivered by our midwives and apprentices without the aid of a man-practitioner; nor an instrument so much as thought of. And in all this number I can safely aver, there were but four who died upon their lying-in; and that not from any fault of the midwife’s art; but one from the complication of a dropsy, the other three, who were daughters to honest tradesmen, sunk under the shock of grief and shame at the being deserted by the men who had brought them into that condition. They died, in short, of their desire to die. Yet the children all did well.