SIR,
HAVING proved that it is extremely dangerous
to employ men-midwives, when instruments are not wanted, I come to the
SIXTH and LAST proposition, viz. To enquire
why there are so few good midwives; offer a plan for their better instruction;
and prove that man-midwifery is a personal, a domestic, and a national
evil.
There are many women suffered to practice midwifery who know very
little of it, as well as men, both having entered into the profession
without a regular education; and I am sorry our legislators have
not long since interfered to prevent it; the life of a mother or a child
being much more valuable than that of a hare or a partridge, which has
come under their serious consideration.
I must admit the full force of Dr. Buchan's opinion, page 591, ed.
9. ‘Though the management of women in child-bed has been practiced
as an employment since the earliest account of time; yet it is still, in
most countries, on a very bad footing. 
