During The Educational Life Of Girls

Clinical observation confirms the teachings of physiology. The sickchamber, not the schoolroom; the physician's private consultation, notthe committee's public examination; the hospital, not the college,the workshop, or the parlor,--disclose the sad results which modernsocial customs, modern education, and modern ways of labor, haveentailed on women. Examples of them may be found in every walk oflife. On the luxurious couches of Beacon Street; in the palaces ofFifth Avenue; among the classes of our private, common, and normalschools; among the female graduates of our colleges; behind thecounters of Washington Street and Broadway; in our factories,workshops, and homes,--may be found numberless pale, weak, neuralgic,dyspeptic, hysterical, menorrhagic, dysmenorrhoeic girls and women,that are living illustrations of the truth of this brief monograph. Itis not asserted here that improper methods of study, and a disregardof the reproductive apparatus and its functions, during theeducational life of girls, are the sole causes of female diseases;neither is it asserted that all the female graduates of our schoolsand colleges are pathological specimens. But it is asserted that thenumber of these graduates who have been permanently disabled to agreater or less degree by these causes is so great, as to excite thegravest alarm, and to demand the serious attention of the community.If these causes should continue for the next half-century, andincrease in the same ratio as they have for the last fifty years, itrequires no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be mothersin our republic must be drawn from trans-atlantic homes. The sons ofthe New World will have to re-act, on a magnificent scale, the oldstory of unwived Rome and the Sabines.
We have previously seen that the blood is the life, and that the lossof it is the loss of so much life. Deluded by strange theories, andgroping in physiological darkness, our fathers' physicians were toooften Sangrados. Nourishing food, pure air, and hæmatized blood werestigmatized as the friends of disease and the enemies ofconvalescence. Oxygen was shut out from and carbonic acid shut intothe chambers of phthisis and fever; and veins were opened, that thecurrents of blood and disease might flow out together. Happily, thosedays of ignorance, which God winked at, and which the race survived,have passed by. Air and food and blood are recognized as Nature'srestoratives. No physician would dare, nowadays, to bleed either manor woman once a month, year in and year out, for a quarter of acentury continuously. But girls often have the courage, or theignorance, to do this to themselves. And the worst of it is, that theorganization of our schools and workshops, and the demands of sociallife and polite society, encourage them in this slow suicide. It hasalready been stated that the excretory organs, by constantlyeliminating from the system its effete and used material, the measureand source of its force, keep the machine in clean, healthy, andworking order, and that the reproductive apparatus of woman uses theblood as one of its agents of elimination. Kept within natural limits,this elimination is a source of strength, a perpetual fountain ofhealth, a constant renewal of life. Beyond these limits it is ahemorrhage, that, by draining away the life, becomes a source ofweakness and a perpetual fountain of disease.