Man-midwifery exposed, or the danger and immorality of employing men in midwifery proved and the remedy for the evil found : addressed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. / By John Stevens.

  • Stevens, John, -approximately 1849.
Date:
[1866]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Man-midwifery exposed, or the danger and immorality of employing men in midwifery proved and the remedy for the evil found : addressed to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. / By John Stevens. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    P K E F A C E. Being about to publish my Botanic Practice aa applied to Mid- wifery, I deemed it necessary to apply to several of tbe higher authorities upon the old system of man-midwifery, to give the opinions of the faculty ia preference to my own on the evils of their practice. In doing so, although weU aware of the awful facts they disclose, I have, nevertheless, found in many authorities such an accumulated mass of evidence and argument against the unnatural practice of man-midwifery, as even to astound one pre- pared with a knowledge of its immorality and unnatural cruelty. Feehngso deep an impression of the awful consequences of this outrage against propriety, this once by law criminal offence, now a *' fashionable custom, I became assured that if this same feehng could be largely imparted to the public, by presenting them with a selection of the same facts and arguments, in proper form, it would prove one of the best methods of hastening the abolition of this terrible abuse ; not only so, but by showing how men-operators make the supposed necessity for their violent and cruel work. I should give confidence to woman, in the Providence of Deity, in her case, and help to restore her natural facility of labor— return to the experienced matron her ancient and natural right to attend that labor,—by introducing the midwife instead of the man—now aided by those extraordinary helps to her art which a knowledge of the newly discovered but simple principles of the Botanic Practice will give her. To the medical profession it may be thought I have been severe