214 ^^^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



than others. The rejection of a natural cause is unfortunate, because 

 it is one form of the belief that an imagined relation is objective. It 

 is assuming that an event will necessarily conform to a prophecy made 

 entirely without reasonable data. George Eliot pointed out this ab- 

 sence of reason by saying, in effect, that some people are surprised at 

 the presence of an evil which they have done everything to produce, 

 and at the absence of a wished-f or result which they have done nothing 

 to attain. 



FEMALE EDUCATI0:N" FKOM A MEDICAL POINT OF 



YIEW.* 



By T. S. CLOUSTON, M. D. 



THERE are a good many reasons why physicians should have opin- 

 ions about the education of youth rather different from those held 

 by most of the public and of the professional educators. Their whole 

 art is founded on the study of the human being — his beginning, his 

 development, his course, his decay, and his death. All his structures 

 and all his functions are carefully inquired into. A doctor must now- 

 adays be a physiologist, and a physiologist includes the mental as well 

 as the bodily functions of man in his range of inquiry. In fact, it is 

 one of the peculiarities of the physiological mode of studying human 

 nature that man is looked on as a whole — body and mind together — a 

 unity, in which they can not be studied apart from each other. Then 

 the practical aims of modem medicine, founded on this enlarged study 

 of man, are getting to be more and more concentrated on measures 

 for the prevention of diseases, and not merely for their cure. To pre- 

 vent disease one must control the conditions of life. Especially in 

 youth, when the human being is most amenable to influences for good 

 and evil that affect the whole future life, must one regulate the con- 

 ditions of life, if health is to be preserved. The doctor finds that 

 health means far more than a good digestion. It means a conscious 

 sense of well-being all over, contentment, power of work, capacity to 

 resist evil influences, and, to some extent, good morality. It means a 

 sound mind in a sound body. The process and the method of educa- 

 tion undoubtedly influence health strongly. If the educator has dam- 

 aged the health, the doctor is expected to put it right. An important 

 part of the physician's duty is to study the sum-total of a man's heredi- 

 tary tendencies, and his bodily weak or strong points, what is com- 

 monly called his constitution. He finds that education in many of its 

 modem forms may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous pro- 

 cess to many constitutions. In fact, the modern physician is rather 



* Lecture dclirered at the Philosophical Inatitution of Edinburgh, November, 1882. 



