Lectures on midwifery and the forms of disease peculiar to women and children : delivered to the members of the Botanico-Medical College of Ohio / by A. Curtis.
- Curtis, Alva, 1797-1881.
- Date:
- 1841
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on midwifery and the forms of disease peculiar to women and children : delivered to the members of the Botanico-Medical College of Ohio / by A. Curtis. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.
11/270
![who escape immediate death for the lingering torment of constitu- tional injury, produced, as Dr. Dewees says, by ill judged and rude manceuvers, under the specious pretence of relieving the sufferer.-—Introd. Mid. p. XIV. In Dr. Recs's Cyclopoedia, it is stated that not more than one case [of child birth] in five of six hundred requires the use of instru- ments ; and Dr. De wees states, page, 20th, that he has taken his measures of the deformities of the pelvis, [the most common cau30 which renders instruments necessary,] from the European Surgeons, on account of the fact that the most extensive practitioners in America, rarely witness such cases. I must therefore conclude that the many cases I have known tho regular faculty to treat, as they would have it, in a scientific man- ner, by which either the woman or child or both suffered death or little Iess,did not really indicate any necessity for the rude and ill- judged manoeuvres of the ignorant pretenders with which they were tormented. 1 have just now heard of the death of one of my early associates who had suffered five or six years from the wretched effects of such rude manoeuvres, and I expect soon to hear of the termination of similar sufferings, in the similar fate of four or five more. As I have the most conclusive, evidence that some eighteen or twenty others of my particular acquaintances have been either killed outright or rendered miserable for life, by the rude ma- noeuvres of ignorant pretenders, and as the authorities just quoted assare me that there is no just cause to fear fatal results in more than one case in five or six hundred in Europe, and few if any at all in America, I conclude that, if I can persuade the ladies to trust altogether to nature, and to remedies that act in harmony with her operations, to the entire exclusion of all ignorant pre- tenders and their ill-judged manoeuvres, I shall perform an essential service to those who have sorrow enough in bring- ing forth children, without the aid of rude hands, forceps, crotch- et*, levers and the death dealing ergot. In adducing evidence from the regular faculty, I have endea- vored to give a fair statement of their best opinions,, as based on their own practice. But how much more favorable to our views those opinions wrould be, were their supporters acquainted with the superiority of our practice, let the enthusiasm with which those who abandon the old practice for the new, condemn the former and applaud the lat- ter, furnish a more just intimation. The subject of the following pages is admitted to be very deli- cate ; but the conclusion often drawn from this fact, that minute instruction respecting it, should not be given in books written ex-. pressly for the purpose of saving the persons concerned, the xnor-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2102831x_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
