HERE I confess myself so smitten with the propriety and sanctity of the precept of the good Doctor’s, and particularly with the needfulness of it, that I would advise every man-practitioner of midwifery, of a certain age that might require it, to have the said commandment wrote out in _gold letters_, and wear it about his arm, especially on his proceeding to _officiate_, by way of amulet, phylactery or preservative against any incident temptation to _violate_ his _trust_, or to fall off from the high _dignity_ of his profession. All that I fear is, that its virtue may not always be to be depended upon, against the energy planted by nature in the difference of the sexes. No one would be farther than I from the cruel injustice of drawing consequences unfavorable to any set of men, from the misconduct of any particular individual in it.[24]Errors are purely personal. If I then so much as mention the case of a man-midwife convicted of having debauched a gentleman’s wife, in consequence of his admission to the practice of his profession of midwifery upon her, it is by no means neither with a design to insult the unhappy criminals, nor to draw from thence an inference to the disfavor of the men-practitioners in this point, beyond what I am authorized by the constancy of the temptation from Nature, to all, yes, to all, who, by their age, in one sex, are not past it: I say in one sex, because in the other, the female, the very circumstances of a woman’s needing a midwife, shews that she is not past the age of, at least, causing a temptation. Further, it would even be a matter of argument on the side of the men-midwives, that so _few_ instances come to the knowledge of the public, of the ill-consequence of a practice which breaks down the capital barriers of modesty; if those ill-consequences were not, in the nature of them, not only a secret, but easy to be kept secret. Who would complain but the husband or relations of transactions between a man-midwife and his patient? But then how seldom need a third to be let into such a secret? I WOULD not then have the men-midwives to be too forward to treat the modesty of the women on this head as a false one, or their scruples as a weakness. Modesty in this case is not only the safeguard of the lives of themselves and children, but of their own honor, which if it does not receive an actual fall in such a subjection to a man-midwife, had perhaps better not be so unnecessarily risked so near the brink of the precipice.