Twenty-fourth annual meeting. 35 



■with the acquirements of an average medical practitioner will find it hardest to be- 

 lieve that the attempt to reach that standard is likely to prove exhausting to an or- 

 dinarily intelligent and vyell- educated young woman." 



The reviewer for the Popular Science Monthly writes of a lecture on "The Estab- 

 lishment and Maintenance of Brain Health," delivered at Edinburgh, by Dr. J. Batly 

 Tuke: "Among women, idleness and ignorance are much more prolific causes of 

 disease than overwork. It is not work, but worry, that kills the brain. The most 

 highly-educated and hard-working women the lecturer knew were eminently healthy." 

 One other quotation seems so applicable to the subject in question that I can- 

 not refrain from adding it: "Brain work is the highest of all antidotes to worry; 

 and the brain-working classes are, therefore, less distressed about many things, less 

 apprehensive of indefinite evil, and less disposed to magnify minute trials, than 

 those who live by the labor of the hands. To the happy brain worker, life is a long 

 vacation; while the muscle worker often finds no joy in his daily toils, and very lit- 

 tle in the intervals. Scientists, physicians, lawyers, clergymen, orators, statesmen, 

 literati, and merchants, when successful, are happy in their work, without reference 

 to the reward, and continue to work in their special calling long after the necessity 

 has ceased." 



Those who have given the subject attention are willing to grant that mental oc- 

 cupation, freedom from morbid self-contemplation, is conducive to good health. 

 We are cured of our imaginary illnesses when we have forgotten them in our ab- 

 sorption in some foreign theme. Women, it is said, are more imaginative than 

 men; spend more time in daydreaming. In their poverty of experience in the world 

 of thought, the imagination is naturally directed toward the ego. 



Statistics relating to the health of college women are beginning to multiply, and 

 they furnish abundant proof that "study is the discipline and tonic that most girls 

 need to supplant the too great sentimentality and useless daydreams, fostered by 

 fashionable idleness and provocation of nerves, melancholy, and inanition," and 

 prove, so far as statistics can, that "the woman graduates of those colleges make as 

 healthy and happy wives and mothers as though they had never solved a mathe-^ 

 matical problem or translated Aristotle." 



What a fruitful and healthful field for the imagination a woman will find in clas- 

 sics, history, the Arthurian romances, Shakespeare, or the Chanson de Roland ! The 

 mind refreshed for the first time by these must feel as though it were liberated from 

 a dungeon. The awakening of a woman's mind to the beauties of literature, thought, 

 nature, wiU always, I suppose, be one of the favorite themes of the novelist. Let 

 me recall to your minds a few sentences from Charlotte Bronte's description of one 

 of her characters, Frances, in " The Professor." " Frances did not become pale or fee- 

 ble in consequence of her sedentary employment. Perhaps the stimulus it commu- 

 nicated to her mind counterbalanced the inaction it imposed on her body. She 

 changed, indeed, changed obviously and rapidly; but it was for the better. When I 

 first saw her, her countenance was sunless, her complexion colorless. She looked 

 like one who had no source of enjoyment, no store of bliss anywhere in the world. 

 Now, this cloud had passed from her mien, leaving space for the dawn of hope and 

 interest, and those feelings rose like a clear morning, animating what had been de- 

 pressed, tinting what had been pale," and thus the description continues. Possibly 

 Frances was stimulated to study not by her love of learning alone. Every one has the 

 fortune to have met at least a few cultured women. The graceful expression of 

 thought and countenance, the tone of the voice of a cultured woman, are indescrib- 

 ably fascinating. 



But we must hasten to our statistics. Swathmore, a Quaker college, claims 



