It
is not asserted here that improper methods of study, and a disregard
of the reproductive apparatus and its functions, during the
educational life of girls, are the sole causes of female diseases;
neither is it asserted that all the female graduates of our schools
and colleges are pathological specimens. But it is asserted that the
number of these graduates who have been permanently disabled to a
greater or less degree by these causes is so great, as to excite the
gravest alarm, and to demand the serious attention of the community.
If these causes should continue for the next half-century, and
increase in the same ratio as they have for the last fifty years, it
requires no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be mothers
in our republic must be drawn from trans-atlantic homes. The sons of
the New World will have to re-act, on a magnificent scale, the old
story of unwived Rome and the Sabines.
We have previously seen that the blood is the life, and that the loss
of it is the loss of so much life. Deluded by strange theories, and
groping in physiological darkness, our fathers' physicians were too
often Sangrados. Nourishing food, pure air, and haematized blood were
stigmatized as the friends of disease and the enemies of
convalescence.
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