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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



" They shall ride and they shall run, 

 .... Leap the rainbows of the brooks, 

 Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable 

 books." 



But of one thing I am sure, and that is, that for 

 one woman whose health is injured by excessive 

 study (chat is, by study itself, not the baneful 

 anxiety of examinations superadded to study), 

 there are hundreds whose health is deteriorated by 

 want of wholesome mental exercise. Sometimes 

 the vacuity in the brains of girls simply leaves 

 them dull and spiritless. More often into those 

 swept and empty chambers of their skulls enter 

 many small imps of evil omen. " The exercise of 

 the intellectual powers," says an able lady M. D., 

 " is the best means of preventing and counteracting 

 an undue development of the emotional nature. 

 The extravagances of imagination and feeling en- 

 gendered in an idle brain have much to do with 

 the ill-health of girls." Another observer, an 

 eminent teacher, says, " I am persuaded, and my 

 experience has been confirmed by experienced 

 physicians, that the want of wholesome occupa- 

 tion lies at the root of the languid debility, of 

 which we hear so much, after girls have left 

 school." 1 And another, the principal of one of 

 the largest colleges for women in England, adds : 

 " There is no doubt whatever that sound study is 

 an eminent advantage to young women's health ; 

 provided, of course, that the general laws of 

 health be attended to at the same time." 



Let women have larger interests and nobler 

 pursuits, and their affections will become, not 

 less strong and deep, but less sickly, less craving 

 for demonstrative tenderness in return, less vari- 

 able in their manifestations. Let women have 

 sounder mental culture, and their emotions — so 

 long exclusively fostered — will return to the calm- 

 ness of health, and we shall hear no more of the 

 intermittent feverish spirits, the causeless de- 

 pressions, and all the long train of symptoms 

 which belong to Protean-formed hysteria, and 

 open the way to madness on one side and to sin 

 on the other. 



And now, in conclusion, I must touch on a 

 difficult part of my subject. Who is to blame for 

 all the misery resulting from the little health of 

 ladies ? 



Of course, a large portion of the evil must be 

 impartially distributed throughout society, with 

 its false ideals of womanhood. Another portion 

 rests on parents and teachers ; and, of course, no 

 inconsiderable part on the actual sufferers, who, 



1 " The Education of American Girls," p. 229. 



t in many cases, might find healthful aims in life 

 if they had the spirit to look for them, and cer- 

 tainly need not carry the destructive fashions of 

 dress to the climax they reach in the red-hot race 

 of vanity. There remains yet a share of guilt 

 with the childish and silly men who systematically 

 sneer down every attempt to make women some- 

 thing better than the dolls they play with (just as 

 if they would be at a loss for toys, were the dells 

 to be transformed into rational creatures), and 

 those others, even more cruelly selfish, who de- 

 liberately bar every door at which women knock 

 in search of honorable employment. After all 

 these, I find one class more. 



There is no denying the power of the great 

 medical order in these days. It occupies, with 

 strangely close analogy, the position of the priest- 

 hood of former times, assumes the same airs of 

 authority, claims its victims for torture (this time 

 among the lower animals), and enters every fam- 

 ily with a latch-key of private information, only 

 comparable to that obtained by the confessional. 

 If Michelet had written for England instead of for 

 France, he should have made a book, not on 

 " Priests, Women, aud Families," but on " Doc- 

 tors, Women, and Families." The influence of 

 the family medical man on wives and mothers, 

 and, through them, on husbands and children, is 

 almost unbounded, and if it were ever to be ex- 

 erted uniformly in any matter of physical educa- 

 tion, there is little doubt that it would be effec- 

 tive. 



What, then, we may reasonably ask, have 

 these omnipotent doctors done to prevent the 

 repetition of deadly follies in the training of girls 

 generation after generation ? Now and then we 

 have heard feeble cautions, given in an Eli-like 

 manner, against tight lacing, late hours, and ex- 

 citement ; and a grand display of virtuous indig- 

 nation was, if I remember rightly, exhibited about 

 a year ago in a medical round-robin, against fem- 

 inine dram-drinking — a vice for which the doc- 

 tor's own prescriptions are in too many cases re- 

 sponsible. But the steadily-determined pressure 

 on mothers and young women, the insistence on 

 free, light petticoats, soundly -shod feet, loose 

 stays, and well-sheltered heads — when has it been 

 exercised ? An American medical lady says that 

 at a post-mortem examination of several women 

 killed by accident in Vienna, she found the inter- 

 nal organs of nearly all affected by tight-lacing. 

 " Some ribs overlapped each other ; one had been 

 found to pierce the liver; and, almost without 

 exception, that organ was displaced below the 

 ribs. . . . The spleen in some cases was much 



