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. But we suppose that his presence is a necessary evil, and the whole proceeding quite a matter of course, in which “sensible people” see no harm whatever; honi soit qui mal y pense. Some such train of ideas may have been suggested by the arrival of Dr. A. B. or C., M.D. and accoucheur, whom you, perhaps, still young in the world’s ways, have summoned, you know not why, but that you had been told, it may be by your wife’s mother, that it was absolutely necessary to engage a fashionable “ladies’ doctor” to “attend” your first born’s introduction into the world; in fact, you began to have grave doubts whether it would be possible for the child to arrive without the doctor; (you may have since ascertained, much to the chagrin of A. B. or C., M.D. and accoucheur, that such an event is not altogether beyond the circle of probabilities.) You have also hired a “month nurse,” recommended by the doctor as an experienced and skilful woman, in every way fitted for her office. The critical moment approaches; in a state of nervous excitement and anxiety you are advised to retire to the drawing-room, which, like a fool, you do. From time to time you are assured that all is going on as well as possible, and at length you are gratified by the intelligence that you are a father. You are, of course, utterly ignorant of all that has been done, what the nurse’s share of duty may have been, and what the doctor’s, although you have perchance a sort of vague and undefined suspicion that you were wrong in leaving all that you held dearest in the hands of a stranger, and that stranger a man, at a moment when she, the loved one, required your presence to comfort, console, and strengthen her in the hour of trial. Nor would your ignorance be enlightened, unless, as we did after years of credulity and miserable evasion, you catechise the doctor. Then will break upon you, in all their horrible reality, the indignities to which you have subjected her for whom you would have given life itself, the purest of the pure, the idol of your love, the very essence of your being, your heart of hearts! Then, indeed, will you repent, when it is all too late, your folly in trusting to the candour of Dr. A. B. or C., M.D., and the actual crime which you have committed in not acquainting yourself, while there was yet time to prevent it, with the “process” by which the man-midwife pretends to improve upon the all-powerful machinery of nature, and the infinite wisdom of nature’s God.
In the bitterness of your thoughts you may, perhaps, venture to question the doctor’s mode of proceeding, upon the supposition that the nurse, having been recommended by him as a skilful and competent person, should alone have actively[17] interfered, when you may be truculently told that he was not there “only to stand by and make reports;” or that “an accoucheur is not necessarily an old woman;” that “there are no feelings;”[18] that “the first thing he always does, when he comes to the bed-side, is to make an examination per vaginam!” with other observations equally harrowing to the sensibilities of a husband.
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; or he may be a vulgar, low-bred person, in his leisure consorting with those of a similar bent; or
“Yonder a vile physician, blabbing
The case of his patient … ;”
or he may be a tippling, jovial fellow, who at some roystering party is always called on for “a good song,” sure to have as its theme wine, love, and woman—for accoucheurs are mortals like other men; or he may be some tyro in “the art,” just let loose from his course of walking the hospitals, strong in syphilitic cases, and with all the recollections of a young surgeon’s life fresh upon him: nevertheless, whatever he be, the very inmost secrets of your wife’s person are known to him,[19] the veil of modesty has been rudely torn aside, and the sanctity of marriage exists but in the name.
——“Such an act,
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty;
Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there; makes marriage vows
As false as dicer’s oaths: oh, such a deed,
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: heaven’s face doth glow;
Yea this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.”
CHAPTER II.
“O shame! where is thy blush?”
It now becomes our most painful but necessary task to explain what that “process” is to which we have alluded, by giving some extracts from one of the principal works on midwifery, and in the very words of the treatise, to prove the gross outrages to which women are obliged to submit when “attended” by these male practitioners. Nothing but a sense of the enormity of this monster evil would induce us to contaminate our pages by the introduction of such garbage; but we are well aware that “general observations make little impression on the mind even of the most reflecting reader, if not attended with a detail of facts which proves that it is well founded; and one authentic example will produce a stronger conviction than whole chapters of assertion.”
EXTRACTS FROM DR. RAMSBOTHAM’S OBSTETRIC MEDICINE AND SURGERY.
“Duties of the Medical Attendant under Natural Labour.
“From the knowledge which the foregoing pages will afford of the beneficence displayed by nature throughout the processes of utero-gestation and labour, and of the admirable contrivances adopted by her to overcome difficulties and avert dangers, it will be evident that, in a very large proportion of cases, the duties of the obstetrician must be few and simple. Generally, indeed, no active assistance is necessary, until after the birth of the child; all that is required of the attendant being, that he should remain an observant, though unofficious spectator of the process, ready to exert himself with promptitude and energy on the first accession of any alarming symptoms, but equally or more ready to allow the changes necessary for the completion of nature’s object to proceed, uninterrupted by any meddlesome interference; for no maxim in obstetric science is of more universal application than that unnecessary ‘assistance,’ rendered with a view of expediting the termination of the case, or shortening the sufferings of the patient, is not only useless, but in the highest degree injurious, and directly calculated to defeat its own end.
“Let it not be supposed this declaration includes the admission, that a partial acquaintance with the obstetric branch of medicine is sufficient for the safe practice of the profession; for although, in thirty-nine cases