From the time of Moses onwards this part of the profession has always been mainly in the hands of women, and in many countries of Europe no other usage has ever prevailed. The first regular French medical society, “La confrairie de St Cosme and St Damien,” included within its organization the Company of Midwives,[18] and from that time down to the present it seems in France to have been the custom to give to these women a regular education, terminating in sufficient examinations, an example which England would have done well to follow. In this country, however, midwives appear to have held a most respectable position some centuries ago, and a curious idea of their importance, their duties, and their credit, may be gathered from a MS. volume (without date) now preserved in the British Museum,[19] which was evidently written at a time when hardly any but women were employed in the “mysteries of the profession,” and when it was a comparatively rare thing, that needed to be specially advised in certain cases, for them to “make use of (_i.e._, call in) a physitien.” The writer remarks that “it is meet that the midwife be a woman well read and well experienced,” and gives a caution that “drunkenness is a sordid sin in any who use it, but is a blemish worthy greater blame in ministers, magistrates, midwives, physitiens, and chirurgeons.” Mrs Celleor, in her letter previously referred to,[20] tells us that in 1642, “the physitiens and chirurgeons contending about it, midwifery was adjudged a chirurgical operation, and midwives were licensed at Chirurgeon’s Hall, but not till they had passed three examinations before six skilful midwives, and as many chirurgeons;” but for some reason (connected probably with their occasional baptismal functions) the midwives were, in 1662, referred for their licence to Doctors’ Commons, thus losing their official connexion with the medical world.