Oxygen was shut out from and carbonic acid shut into
the chambers of phthisis and fever; and veins were opened, that the
currents of blood and disease might flow out together. Happily, those
days of ignorance, which God winked at, and which the race survived,
have passed by. Air and food and blood are recognized as Nature's
restoratives. No physician would dare, nowadays, to bleed either man
or woman once a month, year in and year out, for a quarter of a
century continuously. But girls often have the courage, or the
ignorance, to do this to themselves. And the worst of it is, that the
organization of our schools and workshops, and the demands of social
life and polite society, encourage them in this slow suicide. It has
already been stated that the excretory organs, by constantly
eliminating from the system its effete and used material, the measure
and source of its force, keep the machine in clean, healthy, and
working order, and that the reproductive apparatus of woman uses the
blood as one of its agents of elimination. Kept within natural limits,
this elimination is a source of strength, a perpetual fountain of
health, a constant renewal of life. Beyond these limits it is a
hemorrhage, that, by draining away the life, becomes a source of
weakness and a perpetual fountain of disease.
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