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.