"We might pursue this subject much further; but time and space have alike narrowed to a small compass, and we have by no means exhausted our notes. In the early part of this paper we have touched on the subject of nurses, but rather in connexion with amateur than with professional labour. Many women of a better kind might find profitable employment in this path of life; and if licenses, or diplomas of an inferior class, indicating a certain amount of medical and physiological knowledge, were granted to them, the business would not be beneath the adoption of women of birth and education. _But here again, perhaps, the jealousy and selfishness of men would step in and thwart our efforts; for the presence of such educated nurses would often render it wholly unnecessary to call in a regular practitioner at all."--North British Review_, No. LII. page 333. "Among the highly civilized and numberless ladies and women of China[60] and the East," says Sir Anthony Carlisle, "ordinary matrons are universally employed in the sanctuary of child-birth: and they would revolt with horror from any proposal to admit the presence of a man." This statement, coming, as it does, from such a high authority, when inveighing against the needless outrage upon the modesty of women, which we commit by the employment of men-midwives, cuts from under them the argument of the interested professors of "the art," who would have us believe, that British women, from the peculiarities of the climate, and a high state of civilization, are more liable to accident and danger in the parturient state, than the women of those countries in which the _fashion_ of man-midwifery is unknown. Even Roberton, one of themselves, is compelled to admit, that any argument based upon climatic influence is fallacious, and easily capable of disproof, for he says, in his apology for the study of midwifery as a science:--"In reply to such a statement as this (Sir Anthony Carlisle's), it has been common to argue that, in warm countries, the parts concerned in admitting the passage of the child are so relaxed, that labour becomes comparatively easy; and that hence we are to account for the nonemployment of accoucheurs. This is a very false view of the subject. In warm countries, whose inhabitants live after the same manner as ourselves, parturition is in no degree easier than it is here. In the town of Sierra Leone, so near the equator as latitude 8 deg. north, we are assured by Dr. Winterbottom, who resided there, that having been present at a number of labours, they in every respect resemble those of women in the same situation of life in England. "I have met," says he, "with instances in England where the foetus was expelled with more ease than I ever knew it to be at Sierra Leone."...