"By the people to whose practices I have just alluded a woman is told all possible and impossible things--things the most frightful that imagination can conceive--to cure which, forsooth, she must lie on her back for months. And if this oracular sentence be enforced by two or more of their number, acting in consultation--anglice in _collusion_--the weak creature believes accordingly. From that moment she is the dupe and the victim of the most unprincipled scoundrels, many of whom, by mixing up religion with their medical cant, contrive to bring some of the richer class of women to such a state, that they become annuities to those impostors throughout the greater part of their most unnatural and most miserable lives.... "If, in common with these medicines, then, every medicinal force will produce its own peculiar _local_ effect, _when swallowed by the mouth_, why, in the case of 'uterine disease,' of all others, should any woman submit to the local application of any remedy that cannot be used thus without the odious manipulations of the persons whose conduct every right mind, when properly instructed, must deprecate? "But, as a matter of fact, these manipulations, so far from curing any disease of the womb or its appendages, have actually set up in the sound structure a very large share of the possible diseases for which these people pretend to apply them; and some of the disorders thus set up too frequently cease only with the life of the victim. Men of England! if you only knew what your wives and daughters needlessly--mark that word!--_needlessly_ experience at the hands of those ruthless cheats, your brows would burn with shame and indignation. How such brutality as these creatures practise ever came to pollute our shores, is one of the miracles of the times. A proper feeling in the minds of our women should have preserved them from the humiliation and torture to which they have been subjected; while Englishmen of all ranks should have united, long ere this, to expel from the land the sordid wretches who first introduced the grossness and indecency of the hospitals of Paris to the houses and hearths of a too-confiding nation!" Again, the Author of "Physic and its Phases" brands these counterfeit professors with infamy in racy and vigorous verse:-- "Men, are you men--who lead such hybrid lives, Who, being surgeons, sink into midwives? If with the sex you seriously would vie, Why not the distaff and the spindle try? Throughout the Orient, Arab, Turk, and Jew On such occasions, never send for you; Not even the Nubian, by the harem door, Dare show his face, until the birth is o'er. Talk of the sanctity of married life-- Nation of fools! who thus degrade the wife! At such a moment, when the feminine mind Shrinks from the succour of her nearest kind, Could you do worse, were she a courtezan, Than to her chamber introduce a man? No longer left to woman's gentle care, Travail is now her terror everywhere.