XXXIII.
2.—“... newer vigour to the brain.”
“It is well-known that every organ of the body and, therefore, also the brain, requires for its full development and, consequently, for the development of its complete capability of performance, exercise and persistent effort. That this is and has been the case for thousands of years in a far less degree in woman than in man, in consequence of her defective training and education, will be denied by no one.” So says the learned biologist Büchner.—(“Man,” Dallas’s translation, p. 206.)
And Bebel also declares:—“The brain must be regularly used and correspondingly nourished, like any other organ, if its faculties are to be fully developed.”—(“Woman,” Walther’s translation, p. 124.)
Dr. Emanuel Bonavia, in the course of an able reply to a somewhat shallow recent disquisition by Sir James Crichton Browne, says:—
“From various sources we have learnt that the brain tissue, like every other tissue, will grow by exercise, and diminish, or degenerate and atrophy by disuse. Keep your right arm tied up in a sling for a month, and you will then be convinced how much it has lost by disuse. Then anatomists might perhaps be able to say—Lo! and behold! the muscles of your right arm have a less specific gravity than those of your left arm; that the nerves and blood-vessels going to those muscles are smaller, and that, therefore, the right arm cannot be the equal of the left, and must have a different function!
“Any medical student knows that if you tie the main trunk of an artery, a branch of it will in due course acquire the calibre of the main trunk. If, for some reason, it cannot do so, the tissues, which the main trunk originally supplied, must suffer, and be weakened, from want of a sufficient supply of blood.... Man, and especially British man, has evolved into what he is by endless trouble and struggle through past ages. He has had to develop his present brain from very small beginnings. It would, therefore, now be the height of folly to allow the thinking lobes of the mothers of the race to revert, intellectually, by disuse step by step again to that of the lower animals, from which we all come. That of course many may not believe, but it may be asked, how can he or she believe these things with such weakened lobes, as he or she may have inherited from his or her mother? How indeed! If there is anything in nature that is true, it is this—That if you don’t use your limbs they will atrophy; if you don’t use your eyes they will atrophy; if you don’t use your brain it will atrophy. They all follow the same inexorable law. Use increases and sharpens; disuse decreases and dulls. Diminished size of the frontal lobes and of the arteries that feed them mean nothing if they do not mean that woman’s main thinking organ, that of the intellect, is, as Sir James would hint, degenerating by disuse and neglect.”—(“Woman’s Frontal Lobes,” Provincial Medical Journal, July, 1892.)
These facts suggest strongly that the waste at present induced in the female body by the menstrual habit might well be absorbed in increase of brain power; and indeed, that this evolved habit has hitherto persistently sequestrated and carried off from woman’s organism the blood force that should have gone to form brain power. This explanation would dispose of the awkwardly imagined “plethora” theory, as well as one or two others, of sundry gynæcologists.
And the converse—that the increased appropriation of the blood in forming brain power induces a state of bodily well-being, free from the present waste and weariness,—would certainly seem to be borne out by such evidence as that of the Hon. John W. Mitchell, the president of the Southern California College of Law, who said in a recent lecture:—
“Not only in this, but in other countries, there are successful women practitioners (of Law), and in France, where the preparatory course is most arduous, and the term of study longest, a woman recently took the highest rank over 500 men in her graduating examinations, and during the whole six years of class study she only lost one day from her work.” (See Note LVII., 1.)