Insufficient nourishment
starves the blood; insufficient elimination poisons it. A wise
housekeeper will look as carefully after the condition of his drains
as after the quality of his food.
The principal organs of elimination, common to both sexes, are the
bowels, kidneys, lungs, and skin. A neglect of their functions is
punished in each alike. To woman is intrusted the exclusive management
of another process of elimination, viz., the catamenial function.
This, using the blood for its channel of operation, performs, like the
blood, double duty. It is necessary to ovulation, and to the integrity
of every part of the reproductive apparatus; it also serves as a means
of elimination for the blood itself. A careless management of this
function, at any period of life during its existence, is apt to be
followed by consequences that may be serious; but a neglect of it
during the epoch of development, that is, from the age of fourteen to
eighteen or twenty, not only produces great evil at the time of the
neglect, but leaves a large legacy of evil to the future. The system
is then peculiarly susceptible; and disturbances of the delicate
mechanism we are considering, induced during the catamenial weeks of
that critical age by constrained positions, muscular effort, brain
work, and all forms of mental and physical excitement, germinate a
host of ills.
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