Gentlemen, it would be easy to prove that this testimony of Dr. Lindley is not that of an exceptional witness, or a piece of special pleading; but it is the acknowledged conviction of the medical profession generally, confirmed by the last United States Census, and in fact not questioned, to my knowledge, by any weighty authority. As early as 1857, Dr. H. B. Storer, an eminent physician of Boston, startled the community by publishing two books on this subject, entitled: “Criminal Abortion. Why not?—A Book for Every Woman”; “Is it I?—A Book for Every Man.” Soon after, Rev. John Todd, a Protestant minister of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, published a work styled “Serpents in the Dove’s Nest,” all which works and a multitude of others tell the same tale of woe regarding the increase of child-destroying crimes in New England, chiefly among the old stock peculiarly called Americans. Dr. Nathan Allen, of Lowell, Massachusetts, in his treatises, “Changes in the New England Population” and “The New England Family,” gives overwhelming testimony. “Harper’s Magazine” (quoted by the “Catholic World” for April, 1869) remarks: “We are shocked at the destruction of human life on the banks of the Ganges, but here in the heart of Christendom fœticide and infanticide are extensively practised under the most aggravating circumstances.” We Catholics are not personally interested in this matter; but the good of our fellow-men and chiefly our fellow-countrymen calls for the earnest exertion of us all to stop this dreadful evil. All the works I have referred to exempt Catholics from the blame pronounced; the “Harper’s Magazine” article referred to expressly says: “It should be stated that believers in the Roman Catholic faith never resort to any such practices; the strictly Americans are almost alone guilty of such crimes.” This matter is fully explained in a recent work called “Catholic and Protestant Countries Compared,” by Rev. Alfred Young, C.P., ch. xxxii.
VII. Now, gentlemen, I am very much afraid that while physicians as a body abhor all such murders and openly condemn them, many do not show much repugnance to allow, and even sometimes to suggest, such onanistic intercourse among married people as shall prevent the possibility of conception. For instance, if it happens that a young mother suffers much in her first confinement, at once the suggestion is made that a second parturition may prove fatal. From that moment regular intercourse is dreaded. Either onanism is habitually practised, or the husband becomes a frequent visitor to dens of infamy, where to where to save his wife’s health, he encourages a traffic that leads multitudes of wretched girls to a premature and miserable death. Every one despises those outcasts of society; but are not the men who patronize them just as guilty? Probably enough, if the imprudent suggestion about dangers of a second child-bearing had not been made by the Doctor, the young wife might have become the happy mother of a numerous family of healthy children. For we must trust in Divine Providence. If a husband and wife do their conscientious duty, there is a God that provides for them and their family more liberally than for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. And if He should so dispose that the worst should befall, well, such temporal clangers and sufferings as attend child-bearing are the lot of woman-kind, just as the dangers and hardships of the battlefield, the mine, the factory, the forest, and the prairie are the lot of the men.
The man who shirks his duty to family or country is a coward; women, as a rule, are brave enough in their own line of duty, and patiently submit to God’s sentence pronounced in Paradise, “I will multiply thy sorrows and thy conceptions, in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children” (Gen. iii. 16), just as they have to submit to the words immediately following: “Thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee.”
Certainly, the husband of a delicate woman ought to spare her strength and restrain his passion, but not at the sacrifice of morality; and Doctors ought to be very careful not to cause false or exaggerated alarms, and thus make themselves to some extent responsible for untold moral evils. They should remember that, as a rule, the raising of a family is the principal purpose of a married life. The happiness and virtue of the parties concerned depend chiefly on the faithful performance of this duty. How sad is the lot of those—and they are many—who undertook in early years of married life to prescribe a narrow limit to the number of their children; they had one or two, and they would have no more, and for this purpose criminally thwarted the purposes of nature. Then comes death and snatches away their solitary consolation: and they spend their old age childless and loveless, in mutual upbraidings and unavailing regrets.
How different is the lot of those aged couples—and they were many of yore, and are yet in various nations—who are like patriarchs amid their crowds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, dwelling in mutual love and as if in a moral paradise where all domestic virtues bloom!
VIII. True, such families are usually the outcome of moderately early marriages; and many Doctors nowadays disapprove of such unions as an evil. A moral evil they certainly are not; and the physical evils sometimes attending them must, I think, be traceable to a variety of causes; for such evils are certainly not inseparable from early marriages. As to their moral advantages, Mr. Wm. E. H. Lecky, in his “History of European Morals,” writes of the Irish people in particular: “The nearly universal custom of early marriages among the Irish peasantry has alone rendered possible that high standard of female chastity, that intense and jealous sensitiveness respecting female honor, for which, among many failings and some vices, the Irish race have long been pre-eminent in Europe” (v. i. p. 146). And that he does not confine his statement to female chastity is evident from what he adds farther on: “There is no fact in Irish history more singular than the complete and, I believe, unparalleled absence among the Irish priesthood of those moral scandals which in every Continental country occasionally prove the danger of vows of celibacy. The unsuspected purity of the Irish priesthood in this respect is the more remarkable, because, the government of the country being Protestant, there is no special inquisitorial legislation to insure it, because of the almost unbounded influence of the clergy over their parishioners, and also because, if any just cause of suspicion existed, in the fierce sectarianism of Irish public opinion it would assuredly be magnified. Considerations of climate are quite inadequate to explain this fact; but the chief cause is, I think, sufficiently obvious. The habit of marrying at the first development of the passions has produced among the Irish peasantry, from whom the priests for the most part spring, an extremely strong feeling of the iniquity of irregular sexual indulgence, which retains its power even over those who are bound to perpetual celibacy” (p. 147). No one will say, I believe, that the custom of early marriages in Ireland has any injurious effects on the health of either parents or children. Nor need it necessarily have such effects on those of our American young men and women who lead regular lives and are not enfeebled by unnatural vices or demoralized by dainty food and luxurious manners.
A wise physician has many proper ways of providing for the health and strength of both parents and children without advocating practices which are a snare for innocence. Let him insist with all his patients on the cultivation of healthful habits for the family and the individual; wholesome and not over-delicate food; moderation in eating and drinking; regular and manly exercise, especially in the open air; early hours for retiring and rising. But, above all—and this is directly to our present purpose—let him show the greatest regard for the laws of morality, the main support of individual and social happiness. His views upon such matters, manifested alike in his conduct and his conversation, but especially in his management of cases involving the application of moral principles, will go far to influence the community in which he moves. His task is to be a blessing to his fellow-men, a source of happiness and security to individuals and to society.
LECTURE VI.
THE PHYSICIAN’S PROFESSIONAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES.
Gentlemen, so far I have explained the duties which the physician has in common with all other men, and which arise directly from the natural law independently of any civil legislation. The natural law requires the Doctor to respect the life of the unborn child, thus forbidding craniotomy and abortion. It also obliges him to protect his patients from the baneful effects of venereal excesses. Over these matters human law has no control, except that it may and ought to punish such overt acts as violate the rights of individuals, or seriously endanger the public welfare.