Women, while suffering under the severe pangs of parturition, most frequently lose much of that natural delicacy belonging to the sex, and at the moment when terror and anxiety overrule every other feeling, the _man_-midwife approaches, and offers to the trembling victim that disgusting insult, the examination _per vaginam_; an inquest both morally and physically injurious to the patient, and utterly needless, from the information previously obtained by the female attendant. Furthermore, these men well know that "one fool makes many," and that the more they are able to convince the public of the dangers and difficulties of child-birth, the more sure are they of an unfailing trade in the practice of _man_-midwifery. _Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_, and when they had successfully achieved one generation of patients, the rest was easy; all henceforward was plain sailing; the mothers, despite the qualms of outraged delicacy, once convinced that their safety had been dependent on the skill of the _man_-midwife, the daughters, as a matter of course, followed in their wake; the idea, if perchance it occurred, of the indecency of the act, being promptly set at rest by the recollection that their mothers had done the same. Thus a kind of freemasonry is established between the _men_-midwives and women, which, from its very nature, cannot be free from gross impropriety, and is sometimes attended with most pernicious consequences, of which the husband is kept in entire ignorance.[72] It is a common occurrence in ordinary life to see the _man_-midwife seated as a guest at your dinner-table, or as a morning visitor in your wife's drawing-room, who perhaps but a few weeks before may have informed himself both by _touch_ and _sight_ of all the inmost secrets of her person, who knows as well as you do yourself every hidden charm which she possesses. Faugh! the very thought is gall and wormwood, and outraged delicacy demands instant and eternal redress.