In this country we find that the younger married people are more apt than the older to resort to water-treatment in childbirth. I imagine I am addressing myself to a young couple, who hope soon to become parents. They have talked the matter over, and resolve that they will try to get along without a doctor of any kind. I say to them, Young friends, you are about to pass through a matter which you can know but very little about beforehand. Would it not be safer to get a physician into your house, at least? Pay him for his time accordingly as you are able, and, mark my word, he will be very willing to stay in the parlor, kitchen, anywhere, if you do not need him. If it be in the night, get him off to bed, and tell him you will call him when needed. Thus you will both feel safer than if he were away. You might need him very much before morning, and possibly when it would be too late to get him from a distance. Once the birth is over, and the mother rested a little, he will allow at least a tepid sponging; and the word tepid allows a good deal of latitude, so that the water may be taken quite cool. Besides, too, once you have got the liberty to do it, you can repeat it often. By so doing the doctor will be astonished to find how well you get along. Should male or female physicians be employed in midwifery? This is a bone of contention with many. The facts are these: the world got along anciently very well without physicians, or, at most, with those only who were rude and untaught in schools. I do not know that we have statistics enough to prove much in regard to the question, as to whether the world is more thriving with or without physicians; and as to whether male or female midwives are more successful, the great Dr. Rush—who was certainly a most candid and liberal-minded man, and in all particulars not only in favor of human right, but of “woman’s rights,” of which we nowadays hear so much—tells us “that it appears from the bills of mortality in London and Dublin, that about one in seventy of those women die in childbirth who are in the hands of female midwives; but from the accounts of the lying-in-hospitals in those cities which are under the care of man-midwives, only one in a hundred and forty perishes in childbirth.” But admit that the female doctors in those cities are not properly educated, or so well educated in their calling as the men are—a thing, however, which does not appear—it is not yet proved to us that males should not practice in this department.