IF the parties then principally concerned in the decision of this question, and especially the women who are the patients, and their tender relations of husband, father, or brother, &c. were but to consult their own feelings, their reason, and even that instinct which, in this point, is itself so strong a reason from its being the voice of Nature never unhearkened to with impunity, they would soon, to your objection drawn from a fashion scarce less ridiculous than pernicious, allow no more weight than, in fact, it deserves. OBJECTION the Fourteenth. YOU must allow, however, that it must be a false modesty that, in the women, which can oppose the preference of the men-practitioners to the female ones. ANSWER. I KNOW indeed that Dr. Smellie (page 2. of his introduction) attributes the opposition made by the Athenian women[23] to the prohibition of midwives, and to the acceptance of men-practitioners in their room to “_mistaken modesty_.” It may however with more reason and truth be averred, that the admittence of men to that function by women, would be in the women a most egregiously MISTAKEN IMMODESTY. Since, surely the virtue or grace of female modesty is not an object to be held so cheap, as to be sacrificed for worse than nothing, for nothing better, in short, than the purchase with it of danger or perdition to both the mother and child. After so valuable a sacrifice as that of modesty itself, it may perhaps sound mean to add any thing comparatively, so trifling as that of the hire not given to the person who prostitutes herself in some sort on a so much mistaken hope, but to the very person to whom she is prostituted in that hope of superior safety. I AM not then here to assume a character, that would become me so ill, of a Casuist or Divine, by pretending to fix the degree of moral turpitude in the submission of modest women to a practice, which, I will even allow might be justified by the superior consideration of safety to two lives, if that consideration was not a question most impudently begged, with so little foundation, that the very contrary thereof is the truth. NEITHER would I here incur the just charge of impertinence, in giving my private and insignificant opinion on an undecency so unwarranted by any necessity. That would look too like dictating to others, what they are to think of a practice, of which every one will doubtless judge for himself. The boundaries of female modesty are so well known, and so ascertained by common consent, that surely it little belongs to me to offer new lights upon that subject. WHAT I have then to say, on this head, is purely in justification of that modesty, which the men-midwives are for obvious reasons pleased to call a false one, though so far as it pleads for excluding them, it is an ingratitude to that Nature, of which it is the peculiar gift to the female sex, not to term it even a wise virtue.