288 EUTOCIA. 



it is a practitioner not less inept and more dangerous than the old 

 woman, inasmuch as he inspires confidence; such men, who are, 

 unfortunately, too numerous, who call themselves accoucheurs, be- 

 cause they are incapable of becoming any thing else, take a pride 

 in the number of difficult labors that they have terminated; they 

 resolve to deliver by force, without giving nature, who is wiser 

 than themselves, time to finish her work; and so that they may but 

 seem to be necessary, fear not to obstruct, interfere with and tor- 

 ment the organs, so as to convert the most natural labor into a 

 dangerous one! 



There again, it is an impatient practitioner, who, being in too 

 great a hurry to wait, needlessly applies the assistance of art, so 

 as to be sooner at liberty to pursue his occupation somewhere else. 

 Sometimes it is a timid young physician, who, led away by the cries 

 of the patient, her relations, and assistants, rather than lose the 

 confidence he wishes to inspire, decides on resorting to measures 

 he knows to be useless. Finally, on other occasions, there are 

 wretches, equally criminal and despicable, who, in order to obtain 

 reputation among the people, make haste to operate wherever they 

 suppose they can profit thereby, without thinking upon the dangers 

 to which they expose both mother and child. Such scandalous 

 conduct as this, to the shame of the authorities, the laws, and of 

 the estabUshments for instruction be it spoken, is daily observed far 

 more in the large cities than in country places. 



719. " I feel compelled," says Diderot, " by the interest that every 

 honest man ought to feel in the birth of the citizens, to declare, that 

 being urged by curiosity, I caused myself to be conducted one day 

 to one of those midwives who take in pupils, and that I there wit- 

 nessed samples of inhumanity which would be almost incredible 

 among barbarians; these midwives, in hopes of attracting a greater 

 number of spectators, and consequently of peasants, would cause 

 their emissaries to announce that they had a woman in child birth, and 

 that the labor would certainly prove preternatural; the spectators 

 collected, and in order not to deceive the general expectation, they 

 returned the child into the womb, and brought it down by the feet! 

 I should not dare to state this fact if I had not several times been a 

 witness to it, and if the midwife had not the impudence to confess 

 it to me. I therefore charge those who are appointed to watch 

 over the disorders of society, to keep their eyes upon this one." 



Would to Heaven the fact related by Diderot had never been re- 

 peated since, and that it had never been witnessed except among 

 midwives! But let us draw a veil over a kind of conduct which 

 lends but too much support to the idea of Denman, " that the abuse 



