George Morant

“ What shock so terrible to a man who, rejoicing in the delightful sentiment of a wife’s purity, discovers that all he held dearest and most sacred, all which he would shield from profanation with the last drop of his life’s blood, has been invaded by the presence, and violated by the actual contact of the man-midwife? The doctor may be a sober, discreet, oily man, of staid appearance, and a very pattern of propriety ”

“ As the instant when a woman conceives does not manifest itself in her by any well characterized expression, and the consequences of this act remain for some time concealed by a thick veil, that spirit of unrest which ordains that man, dissatisfied with the present which he may enjoy, should ever press on towards that future, which he perhaps shall never see, induces him to seek with eagerness the as yet hidden signs of pregnancy, and to question nature long before she deigns to speak. ”

“ In a country like England, to clear away a given folly is too often, unfortunately, only to make room for some other folly equally egregious. This, in our day, has been the case with medicine. Just as a considerable number of physicians had come to adopt my own view of the true constitutional origin of diseases, up sprung a class of people who will have it, that in the majority of female complaints, at least, there must ever be more or less of local wrong, which no possible constitutional treatment can cure! ”

“ To him we owe the hysterotome, for slitting open the os uteri, to cure sterility; and to his efforts, more than any other individual, we are indebted for the profligate use of the speculum which has prevailed, and the practice of destroying the os and cervix uteri with caustic potash. To Dr. Simpson we owe the attempt to revive the brutal practice of turning in cases of distortion of the pelvis; of attempting to substitute the Cæsarian operation for the induction of premature labour ”

“ But the most decisive of all, by the actual avowal of all men-midwives, the sole indubitable proof consists in the movements of the infant, which make themselves felt towards the fourth month of pregnancy. Thus women can inform themselves better than any one whether they are with child, and the men-midwives, who are forced themselves to acknowledge this, ought to erase from their treatises on midwifery the nonsensical rules which they give upon the touch. ”

“ Alibert congratulating him one day on the marriage of one of his brothers, suggested that he should follow his example and marry. ‘I assure you,’ replied the irresolute bachelor, ‘that this idea often occurs to me, but one must go before the priest, before the magistrate—there is no end to the affair.’ There are persons for whom pleasing and indefinite fantasies have a charm which they love to prolong; they seem to dread a real happiness which might deprive imagination of its most smiling visions. Roussel was one of these persons. ”

“ O men! if you have the souls of men, if one drop of the old chivalrous blood of your ancestors yet palpitates in your veins, if you have not irrecoverably bowed down to the idol custom, if mammon, lust of gain and power, with all the fell catalogue of vicious inclinations, have left but one cell unoccupied in your heart’s mansion, if you yet hold woman to be the fairest, purest, best of the Creator’s works ”

“ Conquest—a metropolitan accoucheur physician of much eminence—a man who, from the long and successful practice of his profession, has deservedly acquired wealth and distinction—a man, therefore, who can afford to be honest—a man who, unlike Archdeacon Paley, can afford to keep a conscience. ”

“ Whispering mysteriously the words ‘engorgement,’ ‘tumour,’ ‘inflammation,’ ‘ulceration of the os,’ ‘version,’ and ‘retroversion’—phrases for the most part invented for the mere purpose of striking panic into the hearts of families who must ever be in the dark here—these men straightway confine the patient to her couch—in which unnatural position they keep her for months, and, if possible, for years together—during which they subject her to the most odious treatment ”

“ The consequences of labour, which are, to the majority of women in towns, in part a real malady, and partly a kind of etiquette and convention, which subjects them, during a fixed period, to the regimen of sick persons, when they have ceased to be so, are almost nothing to women in the country. Nature, having neither caprice nor excess to combat in them, only occupies herself for their re-establishment; and as they yield nothing to custom or opinion, they enjoy as much as possible the favours of nature. They have not time to crawl methodically, during many weeks, from their bed to a sofa ”

“ The historian well and truly describes the state of society in those evil days, and how the manners of the age became, year by year, more lost to virtue, dignity, and honour, until at length all the better feelings of human nature, even religion itself, became a by-word and a mockery amidst the chaos of the Revolution. ”

“ A difficult case of labour, as it is termed, occurs, the wretched victim is stripped naked, candles are placed around the bed, and the students assemble in crowds, perched on ladders and benches, to watch the progress of the labour, and the manipulations of the operator. O God! that in a Christian land, in our boasted Britain, priding herself on her civilization and proprieties, such orgies, which would raise a blush amidst the rites of devils, should disgrace the name of science! ”

“ During pregnancy the squaw continues her usual avocations, and, even in its most advanced state, she neither bears a lighter burthen on her back, nor walks a shorter distance in a day, than she otherwise would. If on a march she feels the pains of parturition, she retires to the bushes, throws her burthen from her back, and, without any aid, brings the infant into the world. ”

“ Although the easiness of the art of midwifery might have been, among the ancients, a motive for intrusting it to women, they also doubtless had a regard for natural propriety, which suggested that the infant, on coming into the world, should be received into the hands of a midwife, to pass into those of a nurse, and from the hands of the nurse into those of a governess, who should prepare him to receive from men a masculine education. ”

“ Such is the practice of man-midwifery! We observe that, in this revolting case, the disgrace, the shame, the infamy of the poor patient was endured in vain, and that after all the tentatives, and “manipulations,” and experiments, so perseveringly repeated by the accoucheur, without any beneficial result whatsoever, nature alone was the true physician. ”

“ I believe the workmanship of the Creator to be as perfect now as of yore, and that the modern and multitudinous disorders attributed to the uterine system are wicked inventions put forth to sanction unnecessary interference. Why, if we are to believe these men, there is scarcely a patient who applies to them that is not suffering from one or the other of these numerous affections. The womb, with them, is so invariably out of order or out of position, that disease and dislocation are more constant than its normal conditions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After descanting on the inutility, and even positively detrimental effects of active interference in natural labour, he warms with his subject, and, in the course of the three stages by which he limits and defines the operations of nature in introducing man into the world, enjoins, in language horribly disgusting from its technical obscenity, an amount of grossly indecent interference, only to be measured by the credulity and endurance of his miserable patient. ”

“ But of all the medical quackeries that have sprung up in these times, none can compare with the infamous speculum treatment of certain members of the faculty, who confine their practice principally to females. No matter what may be the woman’s real complaint—a cough, pain of the side, or anything else—she is at once assured that it proceeds from ‘disease of the womb.’ A pretended examination must, forsooth, be gone through, which, in every case, is made to confirm the dishonest assurance given in the first instance. ”

“ Nothing appears more extraordinary, or more opposed to all our preconceived notions of propriety, than that this man should bustle into the marriage chamber, our holy of holies, with so much privileged assurance, and that the world should look upon the affair with such perfect indifference. ”

“ It is not the same, perhaps, with the abuses introduced by that art, almost unknown among the ancients, which, under the pretence of assisting nature in producing man, itself sometimes prevents his seeing the light, in attempting to do that which she unaided could more effectually perform; which enervates in woman, by effeminacy and the needless lengthening out of precautions, the instinct, which alone puts them in a condition to do without it. ”

“ Nature, when she works alone, knows so well how to combine and graduate her action that she does that only which she ought to do. Ah! why should she not with ease accomplish an operation for which she has foreseen, and well prepared everything? Why should she not succeed in extracting with facility from the centre of the womb, from an active, flexible, and very vigorous organ, a body which is familiar to it, and which, from its form and consistence, cannot much injure the parts which it touches? ”

“ 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! ”

“ He wrote upon the right of making a will, which he regarded as inviolable and imprescriptible; he addressed public exhortations to political electors, to remind them of their duties and of their rights; he admired the institutions of Lycurgus, and published a dissertation on the government of Sparta. It is thus that the empire of circumstances under which France at present exists dominates over all minds. Roussel, yet meditating with a tender partiality upon the physical and moral constitution of woman, could not resist descending into the arena of political discussion. ”

“ But we know that in humble life it is very common to employ only a nurse or midwife. And we do not believe that, under such circumstances, more dangerous cases of parturition occur than where men are professionally employed. But if such were the case, if the number of deaths or injuries were proportionately greater, no argument could be derived from the fact against the employment of educated and diplomatized women. If, in the present state of things, accidents arise from the absence of men, it is not on account of the sex, but on account of the ignorance of the practitioner. ”

“ All honour to those true-hearted women who so proudly uphold their native modesty, their sex’s loveliest charm, above the rank pollution which, in these sensuous and degenerate days, infects the sanctuary of marriage. ”

“ But the present affair is not respecting the utility of men-midwives, but the impropriety of empowering any special corporate medical body to coerce the rest; to further impede female-midwives in a becoming duty, and to deprive delicate women of that great resource of self-respect. Already the prevalence of man-midwifery has driven country surgeons and apothecaries to adopt this humiliating office, and the number of women practitioners has been thence so reduced, that paupers are in many places delivered by apprentice boys under sixteen years of age. ”

“ Lives there a man who would believe that the strongest passion which nature has implanted in the human heart is altogether dead in the man-midwife, that he is in fact emasculated by his profession, although “not necessarily an old woman?” It is far otherwise, and many of these gentry have the organ of philoprogenitiveness strongly developed. ”

“ The principal reason which, among the ancients, forbade the belief that the duty of aiding delivery could be proper to any but women—excepting [Pg 18] in cases of very rare occurrence, where every consideration might necessarily yield to a pressing danger—was the grand interest of manners. This was an object to which ancient Governments had always special regard. They knew morality to be the foundation of all legislation, and that good laws would be made in vain unless good morals insured their execution. The cruelty of Archagathus’ surgical operations drove the doctors from Rome. ”

“ In the days of Augustus Cæsar, when order had been established and prosperity revived, when Virgil and Horace flourished at Rome, and the vast provinces of the Roman Empire were blest with peace and tranquillity, everything seemed to promise a long duration of happiness. But the Christian Apostle and the Pagan Satirist alike prove all was hollow and delusive. Vice increased, knowledge decayed, power vanished, and soon everything portended the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Again, in the eighteenth century of our era, civilization had reached a very high point. ”