CONSULT Nature as to this innovation in the employing men-practitioners preferably to the midwives, who have been for ages, and so universally considered as the properest for that function. Nature will tell you, that it is injuring her to suspect her of being so cruel a mother-in-law, as to deny her tenderest production the female sex sufficient succors within herself, or leave women under a necessity of recurring to men for aid in their greatest need of it, during those sufferings, to which it has pleased the great master of Nature to subject peculiarly the women. If Nature then is but another name for his Fiat through all his works, never was his will more plainly signified than by her voice in this point: a repugnance in both sexes to that office being administered by a man. A repugnance which is not even one of Nature’s least remarkable signs of abhorrence from this innovation, and is only to be surmounted in the men by interest, and in the women by their false fear, or what is weaker yet, by their rage in following that bell-weather Fashion, though it should lead them like sheep to the slaughter. The uncouthness and inaptitude of the men, so ill compensated by their miserable inventions of iron and steel instruments, form another loud protest of Nature against this important function being committed to men-operators. CONSULT reason, and reason founded upon those dictates of Nature, to which time only gives the more strength, will tell you, in contempt of fashion, that the men-midwives will never do any thing in a matter rather too universal for any excellence in it to depend upon Greek, Latin, or Arabic; that they are, in short, only hatching of wind-eggs, in the study of an art, which no incubation on it will ever sufficiently naturalize to them. IF to experience you appeal, I have already furnished unrefutable arguments of that’s being against the men-midwives. But let them remember my confession, that the number which I have quoted of women happily delivered is taken from the course of practice of good midwives. I am not here an advocate for bad ones, nor would I wish to authorize them if I could. All that I shall say, and dare aver is, that the very worst of them, unless their hands are cut off, or at least deserve to be cut off, can hardly be worse than the best of the men-operators. BUT while it is to the tribunal of Nature, of Reason, and of Experience, that I presume to wish that this same Fashion might be brought; I readily acknowledge its force though not its justice. I feel the power of it, with pain, for the sake of humanity[21]! My opposition then to this fashion is rather founded in duty than in hope. The weakness of it will probably furnish fashion only a new matter of triumph, not indeed over me who am too low for it, but over the welfare of mankind, which it has often, in more points than this, the pleasure to see sacrificed to it, though in not one perhaps more palpably than in this one.