Hints to Husbands Part 7

[74] Roberton, page 486.

[75] Ibid. page 489.

[76]

"The moon had gathered oft her monthly store Of light, and oft in darkness left the sky, Since Monnema a growing burthen bore Of life and hope. The appointed weeks go by, And now her hour is come, and none is nigh To help; but human help she needed none.

A few short throes, endured with scarce a cry, Upon the bank she laid her new-born son, Then slid into the stream, and bathed, and all was done."

_Southey's Tale of Paraguay._

[77] See Roussel, _ante_.

[78] What will the men-midwives, with all their precautionary humbug, say to this?

"On the 3rd of June, 1857, at Moradabad, amid the terrors of mutiny, the wife of Captain M. B. W----, Bengal Native Infantry, gave birth to a son, and on the same day, with all the officers and their families, escaped to Nynee Tal, a hill station distant about sixty-five miles, which they reached in safety on the 5th instant at 11 a.m. They fled with only the clothes on their backs, having been plundered of everything."--_Correspondent of the Times._

Well might this English lady exclaim with the Indian mother, "Here, Englishmen, here is a young warrior!"

[79] There cannot be a doubt that the habit of wearing stays is as injurious to the internal organization of women as it is to their external form. Physiologists are well aware of this, yet European women are so enslaved by custom, that we see them tightening up their daughters, from very infancy, in a framework of iron and bone, until their bodies a.s.sume the shape which the corset-maker chooses, instead of that which nature, in the perfection of her knowledge, would bestow.

[80] Diseases of Women, by E. Johnson, M.D.

[81] "The most natural proof that, in the first ages of the world, the _man_-midwife (accoucheur) was unknown, is, that there is no word whatsoever in the mother or original tongues to signify this profession in a man, whereas that which signifies a midwife (accoucheuse) is found in all languages."--_Hecquet de l'Indecence aux Hommes d'accoucher les Femmes_, p. 1.

[82] Let any man who disputes this position peruse the case of D----against D----, in Robertson's Reports of Cases in the Ecclesiastical Courts, a terrible picture of conjugal contention and wretchedness in high life, all clearly attributable to the accoucheur, who insisted upon the husband leaving the lying-in chamber, and influenced the wife, fatally for her husband's peace and her own, to concur in his exclusion. A more flagrant instance of medical presumption and insolence could not readily be found.

"Here then," says Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, in his judgment, "is the clue to everything that subsequently took place--an end of all that happiness and comfort which might have been expected to attend the union between these parties."

The archives of the law would afford the inquirer many a fearful example of similar evils consequent on the unnatural and sinful practice of man-midwifery.