of thousands!

And it is the natural

influence of women over the feelings and passions of the male sex, that is advanced as the great cause of moral and personal danger to the patient, inseparable from the practice of man-midwifery. On this point many very important considera

tions are submitted in the course of these pages, but they all concentre in the one fact of objection thus specifically stated; viz. that the patients are women, and the practitioners operating upon them are men! and this consideration is the Alpha and the Omega of the topic. But again, are such practitioners actually men, or does their practice make them more or less than men? What must necessarily be the answer? They are neither more nor less than men!

"O word of fear," which ought to be Unpleasing to the married ear,") Ay, they are men, even as Jews are men:

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Shylock. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,

passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

The public however, apparently, has been brought into a different opinion; and although male practitioners of midwifery are seen daily and hourly to be subject to the same feelings and frailties as other men-marrying, and becoming fathers, as other men marry and become fathers-still, it seems to be considered that, by some" mighty magic," they as towards their patients are charmed, not by them but, against their many bewitching temptations, encased in a coat of mail against the arrows of cupid, wrapt in a mantle of Asbestos, incombustible under circumstances when the blood of other men would be boiling in their veins at "fever heat "" Is this a safe con

clusion? That it is very far from being so will be thought by thousands should this treatise obtain extensive reading, thousands who hitherto have not seriously considered the incongruity of the practice.

"Falstaff. Well, I will visit her: tell her so; and bid her think what a man is: let her consider his frailty."

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

That medical practitioners are in truth subject, as other men and in equal degree, to the passions, the virtues, and vices of our common nature, can be the only rational conclusion which a serious, or even a cursory consideration of the question can lead to; and if they themselves deem it prudent to "deny the soft impeachment" of the influence of women over them, it must be at the expense of their gallantry, by claiming a kind of negative characteristic, either of indifference, or of disgust. They take however higher ground, but

can they maintain it, will reason sanction, or experience justify their pretensions?

Whoever may be old enough to remember the appalling disclosures which were made before a Parliamentary Committee, of the shameful and disgusting practices of medical men, amongst others, towards the female patients at some of the private houses for the insane, and which led to the existing strictness of regulation now by law established, will not be slow in admitting that men, though endowed with reason, may become as subject to the mere animal propensities as the poor patients who, bereft of reason, became the victims, or instruments, for the gratification of the lusts of those to whom they were committed in charge for protection! The fact of such accredited disclosures is here merely glanced at, to prove that medical men, as other men, are subject to the vices of our nature proceeding from

natural inclinations and vicious propensities, and can possibly lay honour to sleep for the gratification of them: let the curious who would be further informed, obtain the records of the evidence then given, and blush for humanity.

If in leading the public mind to reflection on the actual state of circumstances-causing both men and women to see, and to feel in consciousness, that the custom of employing men-midwives being flagrantly in violation of modesty and delicacy, would be "more honoured in the breach than in the observance :" if in such object, and performing such task is presented a picture of indecencies and violations which may induce virtuous women to avoid contamination: a picture which may impel husbands to avert from their wives such defilement and from themselves such dishonour,-if in painting such picture, "Beauty and the Beast" exemplified,