Hints to Husbands: A Revelation of the Man-Midwife's Mysteries

G. Morant. Inc.^t

THE SPECULUM

In confirmation of our own view of this most villanous invention, we will convict its advocates by the testimony of distinguished members of their own profession. The denunciations of the speculum, by these morally-courageous men, addressed, for the most part, solely to their fellow-practitioners, shall now go forth to be read and pondered on by every reflecting Englishman who may chance to open these pages.

“We have already exposed, with our utmost vigour, the improper practice which Drs. Ashwell and Lee so strongly condemned. All we said on that occasion we repeat now.... To employ it (the speculum), as it is rumoured certain persons in London have employed it, to attract notice, and place themselves prominently before the public—to use it merely as a means of personal advancement—in fact, to gain practice—is a crime against the laws of morality, and treason against professional honour.

“The erroneous and one-sided opinions, which the advocates for the indiscriminate use of the speculum hold, prove how little they have presented to themselves the true facts of the case. Dr. Locock, who made the startling assertion that delicacy ought not to be considered in matters of disease, and was both for and against the speculum, said, that he looked into the vagina as he would into the throat. True enough, so far as he simply is concerned. He would look into the vagina as an ordinary matter of business, and think only of what, in the course of business, it might be necessary to do there. But would the woman regard it in this philosophical light? Is it the same to her whether her tongue is pressed down with a spatula, or her vagina distended with a speculum? Is her moral state to be left out of account altogether, and are we to treat the most sensitive organ in her frame as if it was so much inert matter, whose great use was to be cauterized?

“We do not hesitate to say, that no man, who regards properly his science and himself, can ever use this instrument without feeling that he is driven to it; that other means have failed, and that it has become necessary to adopt additional modes of investigation and of cure. And if it appear from the inquiries which will, doubtless, now be made—that the necessities for its employment have been knowingly exaggerated by its advocates, no condemnation can be too severe for so great a breach of scientific honour.”—Medical Times, 8th June, 1850.

“Dr. Marshall Hall describes in the Lancet a new form of hysteria, connected with and caused by the abuse of the speculum. In his preliminary remarks, alluding to the manner in which the charge of indecency was received by one of the speakers at the late meeting of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, on the ground of the non-necessity of the exposure of the person, he says, ‘But if there be no exposure of the person, is there, at first, no wounding of the feeling, and is there afterwards no deterioration and blunting of those feelings by the repeated daily or weekly use of the speculum vaginæ in the virgin, and in the very young, even amongst the married?’ He declares that there is such deterioration, and that the female who has been subjected to such treatment is not the same person, in delicacy and purity, she was before. Dr. Marshall Hall’s declaration on this point is fully confirmed by the results of experience. The consequences of the abuse of this practice are, indeed, lamentable. Dr. Hall says he has known cases of the most revolting attachment on the part of the patients to the practice and the practitioner. The current of the ideas becomes hypochondriacally directed to the organs of generation. The very mind is poisoned. A new and lamentable form of hysteria is induced. The patients become reserved, and moody, and perverse, and speak unintelligibly in broken sentences; the peace and happiness of the family are broken up; subjects are discussed on the domestic hearth which ought never to be mentioned except in the sick room—words which wound are spoken, and thoughts which are derogatory are expressed by others, perhaps by the male, members of the family. Dr. Hall mentions cases in which the speculum has been repeatedly employed, and had induced this sad, wretched state, and yet no uterine disease existed. He believes the cases in which the young, and especially the unmarried, are afflicted, so as really to justify the use of the speculum, to be rare, and the cases in which the injection of a solution of nitrate of silver, by the patient herself, may not take the place of the application of this valuable remedy in substance by the hand of the practitioner, to be rare indeed. We heartily thank Dr. Marshall Hall for this additional blow at ‘the pollution.’ It is greatly to his credit.”—Medical Times, 15th June, 1850.

“I have no doubt that I was one of a considerable number, who, at the last meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society (a meeting which will long be memorable in its annals), wished to express their sentiments on the subject of the use of the speculum vaginæ, without having what they deemed a perfect opportunity. I regret that the discussion was not adjourned to another evening.

“I think the profession deeply indebted to Dr. Robert Lee for bringing this question forward for discussion. It is not one of mere medical or surgical treatment, but of medical and public ethics; and I confess myself astonished at the light manner in which a vaginal examination was spoken of by one of the gentlemen present at the Society. I think the challenge of Dr. Bennet should have been accepted at once, and that a committee should have been, and should now be, appointed to test the existence, or the non-existence, of the thousand and one ‘ulcers,’ or ‘abrasions,’ of which so much has been said of late.

“The gentleman to whom I have alluded above, huffed the idea of indecency in making a vaginal examination. There need be no exposure of the person of the patient. Surgeons make no scruple about an examination of the rectum (as if the two examinations could, morally speaking, be compared). But, if there be no exposure of the person, and if the examination of the rectum be frequently made, is there, at first, no wounding of the feelings? and is there afterwards no deterioration and blunting of those feelings by the repeated daily or weekly use of the speculum vaginæ in the virgin, and in the very young, even amongst the married? I loudly proclaim that there is such deterioration, and that the female who has been subjected to such treatment is not the same person, in delicacy and purity, that she was before.

“I have known cases of the most revolting attachment, on the part of such patients, to the practice and to the practitioner. I have known them to speak of the ‘womb’ and of the ‘uterine organs’ with a familiarity which was formerly unknown, and which, I trust, will, ere long, be obsolete. The current of the ideas becomes hypochondriacally directed to these organs. The very mind is poisoned. A new and lamentable form of hysteria—I had almost said of furor uterinus—is induced, with this aggravation, that the subject of distress is either concealed by the greatest effort, or explained at the expense of virgin or female modesty.

“There is a case of ‘poisoned mind’ in the male sex, induced by the quack doings of the day, relative to the existence of impotency, which all of us must have treated and deplored. A similar case of ‘mental poisoning’ is now being induced in the other sex, by the frequent, constant, and undue reference, on the part of the profession, to the condition of the ‘uterine organs.’”...

“One poor, miserable patient comes to me weekly, thus afflicted. She has been treated by the speculum and the caustic for months, as an out-patient at University College Hospital. I sent her to Dr. Robert Lee twice. Twice that gentleman examined, and declared that there was no uterine or vaginal disease. Meanwhile the miserable patient’s mind is absorbed by this ideal malady, and the peace of her husband’s home is destroyed.

“I sent another patient to Dr. Robert Lee a few days ago (whom I had never seen) under similar circumstances, but moving in a different rank of life. The same opinion was given, the miserable patient suffering dire disappointment!

“I recently attended a poor curate’s wife, who had come to London for medical aid, at, as I suppose, great inconvenience. During my short attendance, this patient was constantly urged by a friend, a titled lady (the aristocracy always take the lead in quackery), to send for her physician, who is a strong abettor of the speculum. The course which followed may be imagined, and need not be described. A case of more complicated misery for a husband cannot well be conceived. A sickly wife, afflicted with uterine hypochondriasis, set upon by a titled advocate of the uterine quackery, with straitened resources.

“The advocates of the speculum speak of cases which had resisted the efficacy of the usual general and local treatment, and which yielded to the use of the speculum and the caustic. I have seen cases in which, the speculum and caustic having been employed—and unduly employed, as I believe—the patient remained more miserably afflicted in mind and body than ever, and this the effect of that treatment. Whether the former supposition be as well founded as the latter, I will not presume to determine; but I believe the cases in which the young, and especially the unmarried, are afflicted, so as really to justify the use of the speculum, to be rare, and the cases in which the injection of a solution of nitrate of silver, by her own hands, may not take the place of the application of this valuable remedy in substance, by the hand of the practitioner, to be rare indeed.

“I will not advert even to the epithets which have been applied to the frequent use of the speculum by our French neighbours, who are so skilled in these matters; but I will ask, WHAT FATHER AMONGST US, AFTER THE DETAILS WHICH I HAVE GIVEN, WOULD ALLOW HIS VIRGIN DAUGHTER TO BE SUBJECTED TO THIS ‘POLLUTION’? Let us, then, maintain the spotless dignity of our profession, with its well-deserved character for purity of morals, and throw aside this injurious practice with indignant scorn, remembering that it is not mere exposure of the person, but the dulling of the edge of the virgin modesty, and the degradation of the pure minds of the daughters of England, which are to be avoided.” Dr Marshall Hall in the ‘Lancet.’

Dr. Dickson, an eminent medical reformer, and accomplished surgeon and physician, formerly on the staff, and now, and for many years past, in extensive practice in London, says:—

“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. The patient is forthwith victimized, week after week, and month after month, with a host of operations, for a disease which, in the beginning, at least, never existed at all, but which is very soon brought on artificially by the horrible appliances of men, who ride in their carriages, by this daily and hourly outrage to the constitutions and the decency of our women.”—The Forbidden Book, vol. ii. page 195.

Again, in the same work, appears the following letter, under the head of “Obstetric Quackery in Edinburgh:”—“Sir,—The members of the Town Council of Edinburgh are the patrons of the University. Most of them are known to be conscientious men, and keenly alive to all that can affect the honour and the usefulness of the institution over which they preside. It appears extraordinary that they should have remained so long unacquainted with the leprosy which has infected some of the professors; or that they should not have summarily driven these persons from the chairs they were polluting, when the fact was discovered.... It is to him (Dr. Simpson) that we chiefly owe the infinitely more dangerous and disgusting quackery in midwifery, which rages like a pestilence in London, and in every town and village throughout the empire, and in some of our most distant colonies. On the present occasion, it may be sufficient to enumerate the proceedings to which I allude: To Dr. Simpson we owe the invention of the dangerous weapon called the uterine-sound or poker—pessaries which have justly been designated infernal and impaling uterine machines, to cure retroversions which never existed; instruments for pumping the uterus, to excite menstruation; and the proposal to rub its inner surface with lunar caustic, for the same purpose. 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; to him we owe the attempt to subvert the established practice in placental presentation, by extraordinary statistic tables; and, lastly, we owe to the genius of the Professor of Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh, the baby-sucker! Are these specimens of what the Edinburgh Monthly Journal for this month calls ‘the simple treatment taught and practised in Edinburgh, and which, if adopted in London, would reduce many practitioners from comfort to starvation?’ We may well excuse the members of the Town Council if they are not so dexterous in harliquinade as the University Professor.—I am, Sir, your obedient Servant, Isaac Irons, M.D. Sept., 1851.”

We now proceed to quote the words of “a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons,” which appear in a pamphlet entitled, “The Speculum: its Moral Tendencies.” We believe the author to be very well known, both as a writer in the medical periodicals, and as a skilful and accomplished surgeon. He says—“Were fame and fortune, however, the only results, were the public simply gulled, there would be nothing in its consequences to take this imposition out of the ordinary category. But, unfortunately, this is not the case. The practices of these men leave results of a far more serious and lasting character, not to be sought for amongst material things, but in the lowered and loosened state to which it is rapidly bringing the morality of the country.

“This is a strong assertion, but not stronger than the facts that support it. The profession is well aware of the baleful tendency of the proceedings of these men, whilst they deplore their inability to prevent or to expose them. Scarcely a member of it whom you meet but has a tale to tell of their practices, which, if made public, would bring the mighty from their seats; but there is too much indecency involved in the disclosure to allow of its publicity. Thus are they doubly hedged; their diploma checks suspicion, whilst the nature of their performances secures them secrecy.

“To believe in the necessity for this constant and general use of the speculum, is to admit a sad deterioration in nature itself. Either this, or that anterior generations were great sufferers without being aware of it. Perhaps, like the Spartan boy they endured in silence, rather than betray a want of courage, or, what was more laudable, a want of delicacy.

“But I do not believe in this. 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. Young or old, married or single, whatever their age, whatever their condition, the same opinion, the same treatment, varied only in the selection of the instrument. No matter what the complaint, or what the ailment, the fons et origo mali is declared to be the uterus....

“Nor are these practices confined to the high priests in these temples of immorality; faith in their professions now pervades a large portion of female society; like the flame in a stubble field the mania has spread, the convert quickly becomes the proselyte, and the consequence is, that some men, in the general practice of our profession, are induced to shape their treatment less by the nature of the complaints, than the suggestions of their patients....

“The result of this can be easily imagined; unskilfulness is associated with fraud. The Speculum is brought into play, and startling are the revelations made by its glittering wall. Alarmed or amused, no matter which, the patient is secured, and remains long enough under treatment to familiarize her with indecency, and to enable the practical hand of the neophyte to attain the tour de maitre, both in handling the instrument and the fee....

“Then again, these uterine complaints, contrary to the laws that govern local affections, are made to assume an almost epidemic character, for it is by no means uncommon to hear that several members of the same household are under treatment, as they call it, at the same time....

“But besides those whom I have mentioned as abusing the Speculum, there are others, who, more honest, yet not less dangerous, are, unconsciously perhaps, contributing their share to this work of demoralization; I mean that portion of the profession who, unable to form opinions for themselves, are ready at all times jurare in verba magistri, adopting any practice, provided the example be set in high places.... with these men one would like to deal charitably; but the best of motives must not be allowed to compensate the consequences of dangerous acts; they must not be allowed to jeopardise the modesty of the sex, so long the pride and the property of England.

“That an instrument, capable in its application of such wide-spreading mischief, should possess some compensating good, some power whereby diseases, hitherto obscure and intractable, should be compelled to render up the morbid secrets on which they rest, and to take their place amongst curable disorders, was to have been expected, and had this been so, the case would stand far differently....

“But unfortunately this is not the case; the diseases here alluded to, though obnoxious to its application, instead of being benefited are materially aggravated by its use; take, for instance, the scirrhous affections, in these cases its use is not only inefficacious, but positively injurious—it only adds torture to torment....

“Driven, then, from the field of real disease, these advocates of the Speculum are obliged to invest with a false character ailments that the profession has hitherto regarded as too trifling to admit of any save the simplest treatment.... The Speculum has been greatly extolled as the means of conveying appliances immediately to the parts affected. But it must not be forgotten that the effects of local remedies in constitutional affections are short-lived in the extreme, or that those can hardly be called remedies, that are notoriously so slow in their operation, as to leave it doubtful whether they have not, after all, been robbing time of the merit of the recovery.

“That the profession is silent on these abuses is, in my opinion, to be deplored. Such silence may arise from the fear that the denunciation of them would tend to lower it in the estimation of the public, more than the continuance of the abuses themselves. Yielding to none in the desire to uphold the dignity of my order, I must say that I share in no such apprehensions. The public in return for the confidence they repose in us, have a right to such protection, and if they find that it has been withheld, that, in a mistaken solicitude for our own interests, we have neglected theirs, they will bind us all up in one common withe together, and the diploma, though it may still indicate the man of science, will cease to insure us the position of gentlemen.”[32]

The last extract which we shall give appears in the Lancet, a periodical whose very title is behind the age, indicative of professional bigotry, a record of antiquated fallacy and prejudice. The tide must surely be on the turn, or the exposure of these speculumizing villainies would never have been permitted to grace its columns:—

“On the use of the speculum in the diagnosis and treatment of uterine diseases, by Dr. Robert Lee, the author referred to the tabular statement of 220 cases of real and imaginary disease of the uterus, published in the 38th volume of the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, and presented in a similar tabular form the details (of) eighty additional cases, which had since come under his observation. Of the 300 patients forty-seven were unmarried, one had barely completed her eighteenth year, several were under twenty, and the majority under thirty years of age, and were suffering from hysteria, leucorrhœa, dysmenorrhœa, or some nervous affection of the uterus, without inflammation, ulceration, or any structural disease or displacement of the organ. In Case 256 the patient had been told that the womb was prolapsed and much ulcerated, and an instrument had been introduced for six weeks, with an aggravation of all the symptoms. The hymen was found so perfect on examination that it was impossible to reach the os uteri without using an unjustifiable degree of violence. On the ground of morality, and on every other ground, he could see no defence for the employment of the speculum in these forty-seven cases. Of the 300 patients seventy were barren, and the sterility was not removed, nor the other symptoms relieved in a single instance. Several of these individuals spoke with horror and shame of the treatment to which they had been submitted. A considerable number of the cases were suffering from cancerous disease, in all of which the symptoms seemed to have been aggravated by the treatment. In Case 236 the character of the disease was unmistakable, but after an examination with the speculum a favourable prognosis had been given, and the actual cautery employed for months, and hopes of recovery held out to the last. The author expressed his conviction that neither in the living nor in the dead body had he ever seen a case of simple ulceration from chronic inflammation of the os or cervix uteri; and to apply the term to states of the os uteri in which the mucous membrane or, as it is termed by some, the basement membrane, is not destroyed by ulceration, was an abuse of terms calculated only to deceive and mislead the members of the medical profession, from whom the truth has been carefully concealed. The speculum emanates from the syphilitic wards of the hospitals at Paris, and it would have been better for the women of England had its use been confined to those institutions.”—The Lancet, July 25, 1857.

Such is the language of earnest, honourable men, who have dared to dispel, by the light of true philosophy, the fog of “scientific” rascaldom—that empiric haze so desolating, so destructive to the inwrapped and blinded public. Few will deny that there are, in the foregoing extracts, sentiments which do honour to their authors, and revelations for which society should feel the deepest gratitude.

Were we to relate the numbers of weak and deluded creatures who, upon the slightest pretext, submit to this accursed rite, it would appear incredible. We know that one fashionable pretender to peculiar skill in the diagnostics of uterine affections, has boasted of five such examinations in one family in a single day! and that another has spoken of the exposure of fifty women to his professional gaze in the same space of time. These are facts—horrible, but undeniable, facts! “O shame! where is thy blush?” O woman! where is thy vaunted modesty, in a country tainted by such unspeakable and hideous mysteries, permitted—nay, tacitly encouraged—as they are, under the hypocritical guise of scientific discovery, and the pretended mitigation of human ills? Is it possible that in this age, and in this our land, men should be found so utterly insensate, so beggared of all feeling, so lost to all the chivalry of manhood, that, with this libidinous iniquity made patent, they would not arise, and, in one mighty and overwhelming surge of execration, crush its perpetrators, and abolish this obscene invasion of marital rights. No! perish the thought! The azure blood, which throbbed and pulsated in the British heart in those far off days of the second Richard, when the indecent outrages of the poll-tax gatherers lashed the people into fury at their daughters’ wrongs, still runs in the veins of Englishmen; and we will not believe that the halo of purity, which made the homes of “merrie England” the watchword of our sires, can have departed for ever from those of their descendants.

CHAPTER IV.

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 Reveillè-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 Ariége, 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 Staël, 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.[33] 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,[34] 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?[35] 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.”[36] 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,[37] who alleges that the coverings of the fœtus, 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 fœtus, 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 fœtus) 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.”[38]

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.[39] 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,[40] 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.[41] As these people dwell in the vicinity of the Samöides,[42] 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.[43] 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.[44]

“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;’[45] 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.[46] 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.[47]

“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 (affourché) 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,[48] 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.[49]

“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 ομφαλοτομοι, 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.[50] This was an object to which ancient governments had always special regard.[51] 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[52] 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[53] are themselves forced to expose its inconveniences.”[54]