[72] The _man_-midwife usually intimates his wish to make the examination _per vaginam_, through the medium of the nurse of his own recommendation, and should the patient, struck with the daring impropriety of his request, desire to inform her husband of the infamous proposal, the nurse dissuades her by saying, that "husbands are not supposed to understand these things," and that she will probably destroy both her own life, and that of her child, by refusing to submit to it! After this the accoucheur soon triumphs, the examination is effected without further remonstrance, and the victim is irretrievably entangled in his insidious toils. [73] Roberton, Apology, page 470. [74] Roberton, page 486. [75] Ibid. page 489. [76] "The moon had gathered oft her monthly store Of light, and oft in darkness left the sky, Since Monnema a growing burthen bore Of life and hope. The appointed weeks go by, And now her hour is come, and none is nigh To help; but human help she needed none. A few short throes, endured with scarce a cry, Upon the bank she laid her new-born son, Then slid into the stream, and bathed, and all was done." _Southey's Tale of Paraguay._ [77] See Roussel, _ante_. [78] What will the men-midwives, with all their precautionary humbug, say to this? "On the 3rd of June, 1857, at Moradabad, amid the terrors of mutiny, the wife of Captain M. B. W----, Bengal Native Infantry, gave birth to a son, and on the same day, with all the officers and their families, escaped to Nynee Tal, a hill station distant about sixty-five miles, which they reached in safety on the 5th instant at 11 a.m. They fled with only the clothes on their backs, having been plundered of everything."--_Correspondent of the Times._ Well might this English lady exclaim with the Indian mother, "Here, Englishmen, here is a young warrior!" [79] There cannot be a doubt that the habit of wearing stays is as injurious to the internal organization of women as it is to their external form. Physiologists are well aware of this, yet European women are so enslaved by custom, that we see them tightening up their daughters, from very infancy, in a framework of iron and bone, until their bodies assume the shape which the corset-maker chooses, instead of that which nature, in the perfection of her knowledge, would bestow. [80] Diseases of Women, by E. Johnson, M.D. [81] "The most natural proof that, in the first ages of the world, the _man_-midwife (accoucheur) was unknown, is, that there is no word whatsoever in the mother or original tongues to signify this profession in a man, whereas that which signifies a midwife (accoucheuse) is found in all languages."--_Hecquet de l'Indecence aux Hommes d'accoucher les Femmes_, p. 1.