[68] Before we laugh at this short-sighted folly and cruelty, which supposes that the interests of the two sexes can possibly be antagonistic, instead of being inseparably bound up together, we must recollect that we have had some specimens of the same feeling in our own country, as, for instance, the opposition to the female school at Marlborough House, and the steady opposition of the inferior part of the medical profession to all female practitioners. That some departments of medicine are peculiarly suited to women, is beginning to strike the public mind. I know that there are enlightened and distinguished physicians both here and in France who take this view of the subject, though the medical profession as a body entertain a peculiar dread of all innovation, which they resist with as much passive pertinacity as Boards of Guardians and London Corporations."--_Mrs. Jameson's_ "_Communion of Labour_," p. 40. "When educated gentlemen set an example of selfishness and exclusiveness, it is only to be expected that the working classes should follow it, and so the greed of man is the degradation of woman."--_North British Review_, No. 52, p. 837. [69] "According to Osborne's testimony, instruments are used _dangerously_ in parturition, _one thousand one hundred and seventy-six times_ in every twelve hundred cases; and the same author, in his reprobation of Denman's culpable and inconsiderate introduction of them into practice, makes this memorable remark: 'I must believe that he must have forgotten THE MANY UNHAPPY EFFECTS which have come from their use to our mutual knowledge, even when they had been in the hands of very experienced and skilful men.'"--_The Author of_ "_The Death-blow to Man-midwifery_," quoting _Osborne's_ "_Essays_." [70] "The conduct of medical men in all former ages proves still farther that which we would establish (that the profession of man-midwife is repugnant to nature). If they required information on the state of their female patients, it was to the midwives they applied. The midwife, therefore, passed for the eye of the doctor, because it was through her ministration that he assured himself of what he neither committed to his own examination or to that of another man."--_Hecquet_ "_De l'Indecence aux Hommes d'accoucher les Femmes_," page 6. [71] Albertus Magnus de Secretis Mulierum. _Ed. Amst._ 1662, p. 85.