CHAPTER IV.. "the Chariest Maid Is Prodigal Enough,

"The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon; Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes; The canker galls the infants of the spring, Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth, Contagious blastments are most imminent. Be wary, then, best safety lies in fear."

We have already, in the foregoing pages, quoted the words of Roussel, a celebrated French physician of the last century, whose delicate and sensitive mind revolted at the indecency of the practice which had then but lately been adopted in his country; and before we proceed to quote more largely from the same author, we think it proper that our readers should be made acquainted with the character of the man who so lovingly exerted his great talents to release his countrywomen from the gross thraldom of designing charlatans and empirical impostors.

Dr. Cerise, in the account of Roussel prefixed to the edition of the Physical and Moral System of Women, published in Paris, 1855, says: "Among the celebrated physicians that France has produced, a great number have distinguished themselves not only by their erudition, but still more by the elegance of their language, by the elevation of their sentiments, by the profundity of their conceptions; their names belong to letters and philosophy, as much as to medicine. Roussel is a member of that glorious family of Petits, Bordeus, Vicq-d'Azyrs, Cabanis, Aliberts, which, at the present day, is honourably represented by two writers, Pariset and Reveille-Parise. Through them medicine is not only a useful, but it is also an agreeable science.

"Let us hope, that so illustrious a family will not become extinct, and that descendants worthy of it will faithfully keep alive the sacred fire, perpetually threatened by the freezing breath of scientific materialism.

"Roussel was born at Ax, in the department of Ariege, in 1742. His education, commenced in that town, was finished at Toulouse. His taste for medical study manifested itself early. He betook himself to Montpellier, where he profited by the scientific lectures of Lamure, Venel, and Barthez. These medical studies completed, he was desirous of further instruction, and came to Paris. He closely allied himself with Bordeu. This physician, according to the expression of Alibert, was too illustrious to be happy; the friendship of Roussel consoled his vexations; but Bordeu soon died, and Roussel had the melancholy commission to pronounce his funeral elogy. We are assured that love was the genius of Roussel. "He was still very young," says his biographer, "when this sentiment was awakened in his soul; it was then that his inspired imagination began to meditate on the tastes, the manners, the passions, and the habits of women, and that he made a constant study of their physical constitution, and of the moral attributes which they derived from it. He soon arranged the fruits which he had collected, and composed a body of science interesting as its subject.

"Thus was written the Physical and Moral System of Woman. This treatise, which agreed in its development with a title so imposing, has remained superior to all those which have been written upon woman, without excepting the remarkable work of M. Virey, which failed, perhaps, in eclipsing that of Roussel, solely from its severer method and more scientific manner of treatment. He soon undertook another treatise, intended to serve as a pendant to the former. This new treatise, entitled the Physical and Moral System of Man, was not completed, which, judging from what he had published, is much to be regretted. He caused to be inserted in the journals of the day, An Essay on Sensibility; An Account of Madame Helvetius; a short dissertation, entitled, Historic Doubts on Sappho; some remarks 'On the Sympathies.' He had commenced a lengthened work on Stahl, the celebrated head of the medical college, called Animist, but this work remained unpublished; he reviewed the work of Madame de Stael, upon the Affinities of Literature with Social Institutions; he applied himself to combat the doctrine of the indefinite perfectibility of the human spirit, developed by Condorcet, in one of his most remarkable writings. The problem was then proposed in terms such as could not afford any satisfactory conclusion--as yet the science of history did not exist. 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. Thanks to the moderation of his character, his voice, in the midst of revolutionary storms, was hardly understood, and his existence was not disturbed.

"Roussel loved retirement and unaffected manners. Traits of a charming simplicity are related of him. 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. He was smitten with a violent passion for a young and beautiful person whom he had restored to health. Happy, doubtless, in secretly bearing a cherished image in his heart, he refrained from giving utterance to his thoughts. One day it was announced that this person was going to be married. 'Ah,' cried he, 'I am so grieved; I could not have believed it;' and he shed abundant tears of regret. He was often sorrowful; in one of these fits of melancholy, he ran at midnight to a physician of his acquaintance--'My head turns,' said he; 'I feel myself very ill. I am come to you to implore your attention.' Imbert reassured him, and calmed his alarmed imagination. The two friends engaged in conversation, and Roussel forgot his malady.

"Roussel was good; benevolence, a quality so precious to a physician, was in him lovely and expansive. When he suffered, study was an asylum for his grief, a refuge for his afflicted spirit. He found in the joys of the mind a defence against the sorrows of the heart. His internal agitations dissipated themselves thus without gall and without bitterness. His excellence was proof even against evil days. He lived poor, but the affectionate and delicate hospitality of a respectable family never allowed him to perceive it. He could, thanks to the care of M. Falaize, neglect, quite at his ease, both his affairs and his fortune, exercise his profession with the confident and noble freedom so agreeable to elevated minds; meditate without interruption upon Plato, Plutarch, and Rabelais, and withdraw himself, without peril, from those petty torments which impose themselves under the name of social proprieties. A perfect courtesy with him was marvellously allied to good nature a little rough, and which was not without a dash of mischief. Roussel no more sought honours than fortune. He refused the offer of an honourable employment, made to him by the Great Frederic. He failed, however, to be called to the legislative body. He wanted only two votes. Powerful friends had designed him for the Tribuneship. He declined that honour, urging the weakness of his voice, and his timidity. Roussel was timid through excess of modesty.

"Roussel was endowed with a delicate constitution. He had been suffering more than usual for many days, when he quitted Paris to retire into the country, to M. Falaize, near Chateaudun. Enfeebled by prolonged sufferings, he soon yielded to the attack of a fever which raged epidemically in the neighbourhood. He sank under it the second complementary day of the year X. (1802), aged about sixty years. Roussel had possessed devoted friends; those who survived him remained faithful to his memory. Alibert recorded his life with touching eloquence. He did more; he collected his principal writings, of which some were disseminated in the journals, and published an edition of his works."

This account of Roussel, brief as it is, will suffice to inform our readers that he was no ordinary man, and that, from his learning, and long experience as a physician, his opinions and reflections upon "the pretended art" of man-midwifery are entitled to the greatest respect. Those who would ridicule his sentiments, and treat his arguments as false and visionary, and his ideas as antiquated and unsuited to the taste and advancement of the present day, are those who, from mean and despicable motives of self-interest, would confirm the vicious system which Roussel has denounced, and, while destroying woman's modesty, would erect their own fortune on its ruins.

Towards the end of the preface to the Physical and Moral System of Woman, will be found the following sentences, which we would commend to the serious consideration of every man whose sense of decency has not been altogether obliterated, and whose mind still retains any of those finer feelings, which God, when he made man in his own image, implanted in the human breast. "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. In fine, which, by a usage, as indecently as unreasonably repeated in men's attendance upon women, enfeebles, and at length annihilates the sentiment which most adorns the sex. I have made some reflections upon this pretended art in the chapter which treats of natural labour." Again, in the chapter on pregnancy, Roussel speaks trumpet-tongued, not only against the indelicacy, but of the absolute inutility of those digital examinations per vaginam now in vogue, and so dogmatically prescribed in the text books of midwifery.

"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. Men might, in this respect, spare themselves the torments of needless impatience, since it can neither accelerate nor retard its object. It would be much more in order to wait patiently until the natural signs themselves announce pregnancy, than that the tentatives by which it is pretended they are anticipated should annoy women weak enough to submit to them, without throwing any more light on the motive which suggests a recourse to them.

"These tentatives are the work of a shameless charlatanism, which solicits them, and which disports itself with chastity and decency, to establish its empire upon the ruins of a virtue to which the sex owes its own most solid foundations.

"We here feel ourselves compelled to inform women, that those whom they employ at this kind of trials deceive them, in affecting a knowledge which they do not possess. All information derived from the touch is very uncertain. The concurrence of external and obvious signs can alone be reckoned on; such as the increased size of the abdomen, the swelling of the bosom, preceded by qualms, nausea, and suppression of the menses. 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. To give an idea of the solidity and wisdom of these rules, I need cite but one, taken from a work of one of the most celebrated men-midwives. 'When one is called on,' says he, 'to examine a girl by the touch for some suspicion of pregnancy, one ought at first to introduce the finger with caution, for fear of deflowering her, if she was not so.' Is not this the very climax of absurdity to be willing, upon the simple suspicion of an evil which, perhaps, is imaginary, to produce a real injury, to expose one's self, for the sake of knowing whether a girl had committed a fault, to the rendering more easy to her all those which she might commit in future, by destroying the prime bulwark which in her opposes itself to vice; in fine, to deflower a girl in order to discover whether she had lost her virginity? And unhappily again for the rule, the means which it points out are insufficient to attain the desired information. It is from time alone that this revelation may be expected. Three or four months of patience will enlighten you more than can this dangerous practice, the disgraceful essays of which are worse than the doubts that they would dissipate. Although the inconveniences of this practice are not so considerable for women as for girls, we would never do them the injustice to suppose, that it would not be painful for them to consent to an examination which ought to humiliate them in their own eyes, and which must sometimes render them contemptible in the eyes of others: they should free themselves from this torturing ceremony, though there was no other reason for it than its inutility for the object which induces them to submit to it." Again, in the chapter on natural labour, Roussel says:--

"Final causes, which some philosophers would banish as a barren principle (which is perhaps true in natural philosophy), are in medicine the foundation of the most solid truths, which the ancients, and above all, Hippocrates, have transmitted to us. They have perhaps supposed that it was too trite and too commonplace to think that the Creator, who presided at the formation of our bodies, had made the mouth to eat, the eyes to see, and the ears to hear. We know not if it required much effort and subtle reasoning to divest them of the first ideas of common sense, but it seems to us, that they who reject altogether final causes discard perhaps as much truth as those who have most misused them, for it must be owned, that certain writers have made a strange use of them. Not to travel out of the subject which occupies us, we may quote M. Astruc, who alleges that the coverings of the foetus, in engaging themselves at the same time with it in the orifice of the womb, serve to line that passage, and to defend it against the bruisings of the foetus, and the fingers of the midwife. To suppose that nature, in arranging the objects which should assist delivery, had contemplated the awkwardness of male and female midwives, is to impute to her a foresight which unhappily would be only too necessary, but that she had little for the errors that we are able to commit. She has done all for the best in our favour, so much the worse for us if we mar her work. It must be, said the same author, that its face (of the foetus) was turned from the side of the os sacrum, to prevent its nose from being crushed by the bones of the pubes, and that it might not be suffocated by the waters of the amnios. A child that had been living nine months in water to be suffocated, when passing out of it, by a few drops! O Astruc! have you well considered this?

"Without, then, ascribing to nature frivolous fears, or confining her to details which she disdains, we may reasonably believe that after having alloted to different organs destined to aid in generation, the modifications most suitable to the conception of the child, and its preservation during pregnancy, she would afford those also which should, with the least inconvenience, effect its exit from the maternal bosom."

After describing the process of nature in parturition, Roussel goes on to say:--"O Rubens! I leave to your pencil the care of expressing that touching state in which the last impressions of abated pain still tinge the serenity of purest joy; where the melancholy, caused by sufferings now terminating, is not yet effaced by the most delightful sentiments which can animate the soul; where the dread of losing life, natural enough in suffering, gives place to the delicious pleasure of having presented it to a new being. But wherefore must it be, that this state is the price of a train of inconveniences, and a gradation of suffering often insupportable; and why are we here compelled to envy the kinds of animals amongst which pregnancy is without embarrassment, and delivery almost without a pang, or at least exempt from the sad or fatal consequences which so often follow it in the human species? It would, nevertheless, be wrong to tax nature with injustice. We yet find races in whom her primitive impress has never been effaced by the abuses of a refined society, and amongst whom women enjoy nearly the same privileges as the females of animals.

"The women of the Ostiaks, it is said, never have any uneasiness about the time of their delivery, and take none of those precautions which European effeminacy renders almost indispensable. They are delivered wherever they may happen to be without any inconvenience; they, or the persons who assist them, plunge the new-born infant into water or snow, and the mother returns immediately to her ordinary occupations, or continues her march, if on a journey. As these people dwell in the vicinity of the Samoeides, between the fifty-ninth and sixtieth degree of north latitude, they do not fail to attribute this vigorous constitution to the severity of the climate.

"Meanwhile, in the same history, we read that the wives of the dwellers in the island of Amboina, towards the third degree of south latitude, are in the same category; and the author or compiler of that history, in reporting the fact, discovers the cause of it in the heat of the climate, which renders women's members supple and capable of accommodating themselves with ease to the labours of parturition. One may perceive from this how versatile are the explanations obtained from cold and heat, and how, in the jargon of mechanicians, causes altogether opposite can serve with more vraisemblance than actual truth for proof of the same effect. We repeat again, the effect of manners and custom is not often enough considered. In all climates nature has given both to man and brute the faculties necessary for fulfilling the functions of life with ease. The former has very often perverted their use, believing that luxuriousness, precautions, and an abundance of all things could supply their place.

"Without seeking for examples beyond those to which we shall refer, we might disabuse ourselves of so dangerous an error, if we would compare, without prejudice, even in our own climate, the women in the rural districts with those resident in towns. The former, having their attention continually diverted by their necessary occupations, often find themselves in the middle of their pregnancy almost without perceiving it, and this is already a great deal gained. This novel state, without changing anything in the course of their health, or in their way of living, obliges only some preparations more necessary for the infant than for themselves. Arrived at the end of the ninth month (as they are never in a hurry to lie in) they do not aggravate the troubles which accompany this function by the anxieties of vexatious expectation. Nature sometimes surprises them in the midst of the rustic employments in which they are occupied during their pregnancy, and which only prepare them the better to support those of labour. Finding in them healthy organs and a calm mind, she operates without obstruction, and, in consequence, delivers them with less suffering and more celerity. 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; they have almost always that courage which increases their powers, and which necessity sometimes gives even to women resident in towns. Among these even it is by no means rare to see the wives of poor workmen, who walk to a midwife at the moment of parturition, and who return the next day free and exempt from accidents, which the woman of higher rank does not always escape, in the midst of the studied precautions which are taken on her account; their condition in life does not permit them to be inconvenienced for more than three or four days. It seems that nature gives us powers in proportion to the necessity that we have to make use of them. We have known a young girl who found the means to conceal from her parents the humiliating signs of her weakness, and the operation which relieved her from it. As her pregnancy was not legitimate, she had not the right to be an invalid.

"As for most women in towns, and above all those of the upper classes, instead of courage capable of annihilating the sentiment of evil, all concurs to nourish a pusillanimity in them, which renders it more vivid. The eager curiosity with which they endeavour to find out whether they are pregnant, the new regimen to which they submit themselves when they are declared to be so, the preparations, the anxieties, the alarms, real or feigned, which reign around them, the number of persons who besiege them, the inaction to which they are condemned, should give them a frightful idea of their state, and would seem to deprive them of the ability to make use of their proper powers, and so to render them of no effect. The feebleness and inertia of their minds, passing to their organs, cannot but dispose them to a stormy pregnancy, and prepare them for a painful and sometimes fatal labour. The instinct which watches for the preservation of our lives, which knows so well how to manage its resources in the most serious evils, must weaken and lose itself amidst the throng of succours with which the patients are sometimes overwhelmed. What could it have to do when so many are acting for it?

"Delivery is an animal function which, in all likelihood, nature had no desire to render a disease. This function exercises itself almost without pain and without danger in the brute. In all places where the means of assisting it have never been reduced to art, women have ordinarily labours less severe and more fortunate than in those localities which swarm with accoucheurs and midwives. Whence comes this distinction, if it is not from the difference of manners and methods of treatment in the one and the other, or from the abuse which, in the latter places, is made of a pretended science?

"If the delicacy which results from a luxurious and inactive life renders the movements of the womb more painful, we should attribute the irregularity which renders them sometimes fatal to the mother and the child, to a disordered sensibility, which is excited by attempts almost always ill-directed, and almost always executed by mischance. It is in this disturbance that the infant assumes those disadvantageous positions of which the accoucheurs and midwives unquestionably exaggerate the danger, to put a higher value on their 'manipulations;' but which, in effect, render the delivery longer and more laborious: disturbance maintained and augmented by the embarrassment which the presence of a number of persons, some dear, others odious, some unknown, who in general fill the chamber of a woman in labour, must naturally produce, BY THE TORMENTS OF A MODESTY TOO LITTLE REGARDED, by an air of importance too much affected, which the assistants, and others who are to operate, throw over the affair in which they are engaged. All these objects must excite a variety of sentiments in the woman, which, by distracting her mind, necessarily disturb the organic action of the parts which should perform the delivery. Happy is it, if too presumptuous accoucheurs and midwives do not, by their precocious tentatives, solicit in her a nature which is not yet prepared to engage itself, precipitate its movements, and consequently abort the fruit which they ought to await, weary the parts already too much irritated, and rendered too sensible by the orgasm and tension which they have suffered, and hurry both mother and child into inevitable ruin.

"Women who have the good fortune not to be annoyed by numerous attendants, and in whom nothing discomposes nature, are seldom subject to those catastrophes which, very far from bringing discredit on the operator, who is often the cause of them, only make him appear the more necessary. 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? Why should she be embarrassed in bringing to light an infant whose situation is so near the outlet through which it is to issue, she whom we have sometimes seen conducting, without accident, pointed or sharp-edged bodies through the windings of the urinary ducts, and the tortuous folds of the long passage of the intestines? There are, besides, operations which she loves to execute in silence and in secret. This delicate instinct manifests itself even in some species of animals, which never fulfil certain functions in presence of witnesses, and fly from the gaze of man to perform them. Delivery, from its nature, and from all the circumstances which characterize this function, is one of those which, in the human species, requires most especially to be covered with a veil. It cannot be doubted that they would assist her in a way the most efficacious, if the number of persons in attendance on a woman in labour was limited to two or three of her most intimate friends, who, by a gay and lively manner, should divert her from her sufferings, or by their confident appearance pacify her apprehensions; and to a midwife, whose presence of mind, patience, reserve, and protection should be a guarantee for her tranquillity. It is not to be doubted, I say, that a woman would be by those means more effectually succoured than by the tumultuous assistance of a number of persons, sorrowful, aghast, impatient, whose multiplied and often mis-directed attentions magnify in her imagination the evil which she must endure, and the danger which she fears, and above all by the awful appearance of a man ever ready to operate, always armed with suspicious instruments, and to be dreaded from his sex.

"It must be owned that although the midwife's function belongs to the healing art, it was not intended to be exercised by men. The character of this function, the small amount of knowledge which it requires, the entire and absolute confidence which persons of the same sex must naturally have in each other, in fine, everything demands for it the agency of women; this employment seems their proper existence; they possess all the advantages necessary to fulfil it with success. We know with what address and with what dexterity their hands, small and supple, glide and insinuate themselves everywhere without annoyance, capable of penetrating to the very source of the evil without augmenting it, and conveying the remedy to the part diseased, without awakening, by the act, pangs which had been allayed.

"It is these precious talents, as well as that delicate attention capable of divining the wants which there is not strength to express, and that enlightened sensibility which knows how to regard the very caprices of the complaint, which gave rise to the proverb, honourable to the sex, that wheresoever there is a suffering being, his sighs summon woman to console him.

"They will tell us that long and serious studies, to wit, physics, mechanics, and even mathematics, are necessary to insure skill in the art of midwifery. Eh! where is it that they have not introduced, especially of late, physics and mathematics? All that which is material; all that which is within the jurisdiction of the senses, belongs, without doubt, to physics and to mechanics: one could not move a step, one could not lift a straw, without its being done by the laws of physics; but every one performs these mechanical operations, as the Bourgeois gentleman did prose, that is to say, without suspecting it. There are natural mechanics with which not only all men, but even all animals are acquainted without having studied them. All perform actions, without having been trained to them, wherein sparkle the most subtle mechanics; all know of themselves, and without previous practice, how to assume the most convenient postures which their different wants demand. Those who compose treatises on midwifery describe at great length the position which a woman ought to take during labour, and that which is proper for the accoucheur. The legs of this latter, say they, ought to describe an angle of forty-five degrees. An operator, to give lustre to his art, may well appeal to that of mechanics and geometry; but he ought not to say that it is above the capacity of women. The sole difference which exists, perhaps, between them is, that a woman, in abandoning herself to her natural dexterity, in liberating herself from the constraint of a fixed position, and in effecting the movements which circumstances require, rather than those which the rule demands, will go about the work better than the man-midwife gravely moored (affourche) at his angle of forty-five degrees.

"The art of midwifery, stripped of regulations, useless or of little moment, and of the frivolous finery wherein it has been arrayed, reduces itself to a very small number of simple principles, easy to attain, and most suitable to the capacity of women. They soon learn what are those faulty positions which the infant may take in the womb: what are those which they may rectify; and those which, not being remediable, leave nothing to the address of the operator but the wise resolution to diminish, as much as possible, their inconveniences.

"Again, it must be considered, that those principles are not to be applied, excepting in cases wherein nature, insufficient in herself, demands the assistance of another's hand; for, by the avowal of accoucheurs themselves, natural labour, which is and ought to be the most common, can conduct itself without the intervention of art. We may then conclude, with certainty, that accoucheurs who 'manipulate,' who instrumentalize us much as they can, most frequently do it without necessity, and from this cause are prejudicial to the success of the operation. We may also, in that way, reduce to their just value the exaggerated details which they give of pretended obstacles which they have had to overcome, of the address and dexterity which was necessary to surmount them; details which seem intended to show that the delivery had been their work, or that, at least, much of it was theirs, and very little nature's own.

"Either, in the time of the Greeks, women were delivered with greater ease than now, or they judged better than us of the true degree of influence that the midwife or the accoucheur possesses in this function. By the appellation which they gave to their midwives, it appears that they limited them to the duty of cutting the umbilical cord; they called them [Greek: omphalotomoi], umbilical cord-cutters. The females of animals perform this operation with their teeth; and as the umbilical cord can in their case do without a ligature, there are authors who doubt whether it is as essential in man as many persons pretend. There are observations for and against it. This is not the place to discuss this question; but we believe that they may much deceive themselves if they look upon the umbilical cord as a simple continuation of the vessels of the child or of the mother, and not as a fragment of affinity which only serves, for a certain time, as a point of communication established between the mother and the infant, that nature retains so long as she requires it, but which she leaves to decay, and fall away, when it is no longer useful to her. After the delivery she contracts, compresses, and closes up the part of the infant to which it adheres; and by intercepting the blood and the life which gives it subsistence, she soon causes it to wither and dry up, without any prejudice to the child.

"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. A repository so weak and so delicate would perhaps have found, in the rough and unbending kindness of the latter, aid less adapted to its state; it required a gentle and yielding support, knowing how to be pliant as itself, the better to defend it. In fine, the care of infancy is the destination of women; it is a task which nature has assigned them. It is woman who must bear the infant during nine months in her womb; it is woman who ought to facilitate the means of its exit; it is woman who should furnish the first nourishment which it requires; in fine, it is woman who should keep watch over the first developments of its organs and of its mind, and prepare it for the lessons which should elevate it to the condition of man. But the principal reason which, among the ancients, forbade the belief that the duty of aiding delivery could be proper to any but women, excepting 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 medical men from Rome. She banished also from her bosom the Greek philosophers and orators, who were accused of having introduced and cultivated the taste for the arts and vices of Greece. She would surely not have permitted, for any length of time, the existence of an art which, practised by men, would, under the specious pretence of utility, threaten the sanctuary of marriage, and which, striking a blow at the chief safeguard of families, would next attack the mainsprings of the state; an art which, with power to alarm the modesty of women, would soon leave them without a blush, and cause them to lose even the recollection of that severe virtue which had merited the respect and veneration of the Romans, and which of old had been the principle of the grandest revolutions. Cato, always careful to protect the hearts of the citizens from corruption, would never have permitted their wives, when presenting children to the republic, to tarnish the favour by a forgetfulness of the first of all decencies. All nations were sufficiently agreed, up to the middle of the last century, never to admit the agency of men in delivery. M. Astruc alleges that it was not until 1663 that they began at court to make use of a man-midwife, and this was, say they, on one of those occasions when honour in danger takes counsel but from the perplexity which misleads it, and violates one part of its rules to save the other. Who would believe it? It was shame which compelled recourse, for the first time, to men. A king, who knew the force of example on the throne, and who wished to conceal his weaknesses, and to be tender of the delicacy of her who shared them, believed that he could not place in better hands an interest so dear. It is thus that Jupiter sometimes confided to the inferior gods, rather than to the goddesses, his embarrassments, and the care of concealing from the eyes of Juno the fruits of his infidelities. Whatever it might be, unquestionably it was not in a tranquil moment that a woman could, for the first time, make up her mind to abandon herself to the mercy of a man to deliver her. The first examples having been given by those persons whose rank and condition carried opinion with them, the usage of men-midwives is since extended and spread with that rapidity which is common to all inventions of luxury, although even physicians are themselves forced to expose its inconveniences."