Compendious system of midwifery : chiefly designed to facilitate the inquiries.

  • William Potts Dewees
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Compendious system of midwifery : chiefly designed to facilitate the inquiries. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

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    N y INTRODUCTION. IT has often been declared, that labour, being a natural act, does not require the interference of art for either its promotion or its accomplishment; and, consequendy, that when this be- comes necessary, it only forms an exception to the rule. This view of the subject has had many followers; and has, from its influence, retarded, more perhaps than any other circumstance, the progress of improvement in this most important branch of medical science. It so entireW comported with the theories of the fastidious admirers of nature ; it so completely coincided with the feelings of those whose supineness made them averse to enquiry; so effectually apologized for ignorance ; and so plau- sibly extenuated the evils arising from neglect, or the want of the proper and judicious application of skill, as to secure in its favour by far the greater portion of the practitioners of Mid- wifery. An error in premises must almost necessarily lead to error in deduction ; hence the too exclusive reliance on the powers of nature, to overcome every obstacle connected with parturition— hence the almost total disregard of the first and most important principles in the art of midwifer}'. These errors originated in ignorance, and were perhaps at first excusable from this cause ; but how reprehensible do they become now, since the powers of nature are better calculated, and the resources of art better understood ! In what light, then, should we view writers, who still inculcate such doctrines—teachers who make the whole art of midwifery consist in doing nothing ? [2]