An experienced gynæcologist writes:—“For want of proper information in this matter, many a frightened girl has resorted to every conceivable device to check what she supposed to be an unnatural and dangerous hæmorrhage, and thereby inaugurated menstrual derangements which have prematurely terminated her life, or enfeebled her womanhood. I have been consulted by women of all ages, who frankly attributed their physical infirmities to the fact of their having applied ice, or made other cold applications locally, in their frantic endeavours to arrest the first menstrual flow.”
What general practitioner has not met with analogous instances in the circle of his own patients?
7.—“... ere fit ...”
“The physician, whose duty is not only to heal the sick, but also to prevent disease and to improve the race, and hence who must be a teacher of men and women, should teach sound doctrine in regard to the injurious results of precocious marriage. Mothers especially ought to be taught, though some have learned the lesson by their own sad experience, that puberty and nubility are not equivalent terms, but stand for periods of life usually separated by some years; the one indicates capability, the other fitness, for reproduction.”—Parvin (“Obstetrics,” p. 91).
Id.... “The general maturity of the whole frame is the true indication that the individual, whether male or female, has reached a fit age to reproduce the species. It is not one small and unimportant symptom by which this question must be judged. Many things go to make up virility in man; the beard, the male voice, the change in figure, and the change in disposition; and in girls there is a long period of development in the bust, in the hips, in bone and muscle, changes which take years for their proper accomplishment before the girl can be said to have grown into a woman. All this is not as a rule completed before the age of twenty. Woman’s form is not well developed before she is twenty years old; her pelvis, which has been called the laboratory of generation, has not its perfect shape until then; hence an earlier maternity is not desirable. If the demand is made on the system before that, the process of development is necessarily interfered with, and both mother and offspring suffer. Even in countries where the age of marriage is between twenty and twenty-five, where, therefore, the mother has not been weakened by early maternity, it is remarked that the strongest children are born to parents of middle age, i.e., from thirty-five to forty; this, the prime of life to the parent, is the happiest moment for the advent of her progeny.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (Address to the Hindoos).
See also end of Note XXIV., 1.
8.—“Abnormal fruits of birth ...”
Dr. John Thorburn, in his “Lecture introductory to the Summer Course on Obstetric Medicine,” Victoria University, Manchester, 1884, says:—“Let me briefly remind you of what occurs at each menstrual period. During nearly one week out of every four there occurs the characteristic phenomenon of menstruation, which in itself has some temporary impoverishing effect, though, in health, nature speedily provides the means of recuperation. Along with this we have a marked disturbance in the circulation of the pelvis, leading to alterations in the weight, conformation, and position of the uterus. We have also tissue changes occurring, not perhaps yet thoroughly understood, but leading to ruptures in the ovary, and to exfoliation of the uterine lining membrane, a kind of modified abortion, in fact. These changes in most instances are accompanied by signs of pain and discomfort, which, if they were not periodic and physiological, would be considered as symptoms of disease.”
(The italics are not in the original.) Here is certainly cogent evidence of “abnormal fruit of birth,” and the learned doctor seems to be on the verge of making the involuntary discovery. But he follows the usual professional attempt (see Note XXX., 4) to class menstruation as a physiological and not a pathological fact; as a natural, painful incident, and not an acquired painful consequence. His half-declared argument, that, because an epoch of pain is periodic it is therefore not symptomatic of disease, is a theory as unsatisfactory as novel.
Id.... Some of the facts connected with parthenogenesis, alternate generation, the impregnation of insects, &c., passed on through more than one generation, would show by analogy this class of phenomena not extranatural or unprecedented, but abnormal and capable of rectification or reduction to pristine normality or non-existence. The fact of occasional instances of absence of menstruation, yet with a perfect potentiality of child-bearing, indicates this latter possibility. That the male being did not correspondingly suffer in personal physiological sequence is explicable on the ground that the masculine bodily function of parentage cannot be subjected to equal forced sexual abuse; though in the male sex also there is indication that excess may leave hereditary functional trace. And that, again, a somewhat analogous physical abnormality may be induced by man in other animals, compare the intelligent words of George Eliot in her poem, “A Minor Prophet”:—