Dr. Kinglake, in reply to Mr. Wayte and others, on obstetric practice.

  • Robert Kinglake
Date:
[1816]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Kinglake, in reply to Mr. Wayte and others, on obstetric practice. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    r substituting the fallacies and incorrectnesses of human rea- soning for the steady and salutary ordinances of natural provision. Far be it from me to broach or countenance a doctrine that would diminish an iota of the care and attention due to impregnated females. They are, above all other claimants, en- titled to the unremitted assiduities of a generous and feeling interest in their important situation. But their most needful and friendly aid on these occasions is unshaken confidence in the natural security in which they have been providently- placed. No ground for apprehension can ever be reasonably entertained, from the general order of things, respecting their situation. If occasion for assistance should arise, it will be an exception to the ordinary course of experience, and, like all other exceptions to general rules, it may be remedied when it actually presents; but it can never be justly an ob- ject of fearful anticipation and of anxious care. Were human existence to be saddened by groundless dread that the mere possibility of an accidental organic derangement of health may be incessantly occurring, to what other end could the scheme of rational life have been instituted than to that of hopeless misery ? Nature needs not my feeble advocacy to vindicate her from such inadmissible distrust of her com- petency to fulfil the high and gratifying destinations with which all her provisions are happily fraught. I am not about to run the gauntlet of every obstetric-at- tack that might be made on me from amongst the vast num- ber of persons practising that art. No volume could be large enough to contain such instances as Mr. Wayte has cited in proof of what he holds to be necessary in midwifery practice. It would not become me to question, in the small- est degree, the correctness of that gentleman’s narrative; nor could that liberty be taken with any of the immense mass of authorities which Dr. Merriman and Co. might adduce in support of their pre-conceived and determined views of ob- stetric practice. It would be also invidious in me to descend to instances calculated to rebut and annul the inferences that might be supposed to flow from such citations of urgent necessity ; yet 1 will, in the simplicity and honesty of truth state a few examples of cases of an opposite tendency to those of my opponent (Mr. Wayte). Some years since, 1 was desired to visit, in consultation a female suffering under what were regarded as ineffectual labour-pains. The surgeon who was in attendance, and who had assisted on three former occasions at the patient’s accouchement, tvas well versed in the obstetric art, and was in every respect, an intelligent, moral, aud feeling man! ' On
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