XXVI.
1.—“Thoughts like to these are breathings of the truth.”
“I submit that there is a spiritual, a poetic, and, for aught we know, a spontaneous and uncaused element in the human mind, which ever and anon suddenly, and without warning, gives us a glimpse and a forecast of the future, and urges us to seize truth, as it were, by anticipation. In attacking the fortress we may sometimes storm the citadel without stopping to sap the outworks. That great discoveries have been made in this way the history of our knowledge decisively proves.”—H. T. Buckle (“Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge”).
Id.... “Then there is the inner consciousness—the psyche—that has never yet been brought to bear upon life and its questions. Besides which, there is a supersensuous reason. Observation is perhaps more powerful an organon than either experiment or empiricism. If the eye is always watching, and the mind on the alert, ultimately chance supplies the solution.”—Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” Chap. X.).
Id.... “Women only want hints, finger-boards, and finding these, will follow them to Nature. The quick-glancing intellect will gather up, as it moves over the ground, the almost invisible ends and threads of thought, so that a single volume may convey to the mind of woman truths which man would require to have elaborated in four or six.”—Eliza W. Farnham (“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 420).
3.—“... futile mannish pleas ...”
Roussel details fully some nine of these main theories or explanations of the habitude. (“Système,” Note A.)
6.—“In blindness born ...”
“Tous ces faits nous induisent fortement à conjecturer qu’il a dû exister un temps ou les femmes n’étaient point assujettiés à ce tribut incommode; que le flux menstruel bien loin d’être une institution naturelle, est au contraire un besoin factice contracté dans l’état sociale.”—Roussel (Op. cit., Chap. II.).
Note that menstruation (scriptural “sickness”) remains a pathological incident, not, as child-birth, an indubitably natural and normal physical function.
See also Note XXX., 4.
Id.—“... in error fostered ...”
Not only the habit itself, but its causes. And this by medical, i.e., assumedly curative, practitioners. As to which “fostering,” medical and clinical manuals afford abundant spontaneous and ingenuous testimony, and also of other professional practices of instigation, or condonation, or complicity, at which a future age will look aghast. Conf. the following from Whitehead, “On the Causes and Treatment of Abortion and Sterility” (Churchill, 1847):—
“In a case under my care of pregnancy in a woman, with extreme deformity of the pelvis, wherein it was considered advisable to procure abortion in the fifth month of the process, the ergot alone was employed, and, at first, with the desired effect.” [The italics are not in the doctor’s book; he remarks nothing wrong or immoral, and—in an unprofessional person—illegal, and open to severest penalty; he is simply detailing the effects of a specified medicament.] “It was given in three successive pregnancies, and in each instance labour pains came on after eight or ten doses had been administered, and expulsion was effected by the end of the third day. It was perseveringly tried in a fourth pregnancy in the same individual, and failed completely” (p. 254).
There is an ominous silence as to whether the patient’s health or life also “failed completely.”
See further a case noted on p. 264, op. cit.:—
1st child, still-born, in eighth month, April 1832.
2nd child, abortion at end of 6th month.
3rd child, abortion at end of 6th month.
4th child, abortion at end of 5th month.
5th child, abortion soon after quickening, Summer, 1838.
6th child, still-born, 7th October, 1839.
7th child, no clear record given.
Also other somewhat parallel cases given, the constant incidental accompaniment being painful physical suffering and grave inconvenience, frequently with fatal results. Medical records are full of similar histories. To the unsophisticated mind, two questions sternly suggest themselves: Firstly, Is it meet or right for an honourable profession, or any individual member of it, to be particeps criminis in such proceedings as the above? and, secondly, is the indicated connubial morality on any higher level, or likely to be attended with any better consequences, than the prior ignorant or savage abuses which are responsible for woman’s present physical condition?
The advocacy of cardinal reform in this direction—in the wrong done both to the individual and the race—is urgent part of the duty of our newly-taught medical women. Nor are their eyes closed nor their mouths dumb in the matter. Dr. Caroline B. Winslow is quoted by the Woman’s Journal of Boston, U.S., 16th Jan., 1892, as saying in an article on “The Right to be Well Born”: “What higher motive can a man have in life than to labour steadily to prepare the way for the coming of a higher, better humanity?... Dense ignorance prevails in our profession, and is reflected by laymen. All their scientific studies and years of medical practice have failed to convict men of the wrongs and outrages done to women; wrongs that no divine laws sanction, and no legal enactments can avert....
“The physician is a witness of the modern death-struggles and horrors of maternity; he sees lives pass out of his sight; he makes vain attempts to restore broken constitutions, broken by violating divine laws that govern organic matter: laws that are obeyed by all animal instinct; yet all this knowledge, observation, and experience have failed to reveal to the benighted intellect and obtuse moral sense of the ordinary practitioner this great wrong. He makes no note of the unhallowed abuse that only man dares; neither will he mark the disastrous and deteriorating effect of this waste of vital force on his own offspring. The mental, moral, and physical imperfections of the rising generation are largely the result of outraged motherhood.”
7.—“The spurious function growing ...”
Mr. Francis Darwin, in a paper on “Growth Curvatures in Plants,” says of the biologist, Sachs, who had made researches in the same phenomena: “He speaks, too, of custom or use, building up the specialised ‘instinct’ for certain curvatures. (Sachs’ ‘Arbeiten,’ 1879.) These are expressions consistent with our present views.”—(Presidential Address to the Biological Section of the British Association, 1891.)
In the same section was also read a paper by Francis Darwin and Dorothea F. N. Pertz, “On the Artificial Production of Rhythm in Plants,” in which were detailed results very apposite to this “growing of a spurious function.”
8.—“... almost natural use the morbid mode appears.”
“So true is it that unnatural generally only means uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,” p. 22).