This is a dark picture, but it is a true one—inexorably true. Let us hasten to add that such a mental condition is, however, neither a necessary nor a frequent concomitant of the change. We depict it, so that friends and relatives may better appreciate the sufferings of a class too little understood, and so that women themselves, by knowing the cause of such complaints, and the sad results which flow from them, may make the more earnest efforts to avoid them.
Other symptoms are, a sense of choking, a feeling of faintness, shooting pains in the back and loins, creepings and chilliness, a feeling as if a hand were applied to the back or the cheek, a fidgety restlessness, inability to fix the mind on reading or in following a discourse, and a loss of control over the emotions, so that she is easily affected to tears or to laughter. All these merely indicate that nature is employing all her powers to bring about that mysterious transformation in the economy by which she deprives the one sex for ever of partaking in the creative act after a certain age, while she only diminishes the power of the other.
EFFECTS ON THE CHARACTER.
The effects on the character of this 'grand climacteric' are often marked. Not unfrequently the woman becomes more masculine in thought and habit, as has been admirably described by Dr. Tilt:—'There are almost always while the change is progressing various forms of nervous irritability and some amount of confusion and bewilderment, which seem to deprive women of the mental endowments to which they had acquired a good title by forty years' enjoyment. They often lose confidence in themselves, are unable to manage domestic or other business, and are more likely to be imposed on either within or without the family circle. When the change is effected, the mind emerges from the clouds in which it has seemed lost. Thankful that they have escaped from real sufferings, women cease to torture themselves with imaginary woes, and as they feel the ground grow steadier underfoot, they are less dependent on others—for, like the body, the mental faculties then assume a masculine character. The change of life does not give talents, but it often imparts a firmness of purpose to bring out effectively those that are possessed, whether it be to govern a household, to preside in a drawing-room, or to thread and unravel political entanglements. When women are no longer hampered by a bodily infirmity periodically returning, they have more time at their disposal, and for obvious reasons they are less subject to be led astray by a too ardent imagination, or by wild flights of passion.'
Changes in the moral character also frequently show themselves, and for a time astonish friends and relatives. These shades of moral insanity all disappear in a little while, if there be no family tendency to insanity to prolong and intensify them.
THOSE WHO SUFFER MOST.
Those women especially may anticipate serious trouble at this epoch in whom the change at puberty was accompanied by distressful and obstinate disorders,—those in whom the menstrual periods have usually been attended with considerable pain and prostration, and those in whose married life several abortions or several tedious and unnatural labors have occurred; also those who from some temporary cause are reduced in health and strength,—as from repeated attacks of intermittent fever, or disorders of the liver and digestive organs. Still more predisposed are they who are subject to some of those displacements or local ulcerations which we have mentioned in our chapter on Health in Marriage. It becomes of great consequence, that any such deviation from the healthy standard shall be corrected before a woman reaches this trying passage in her career.
The constitution and temperament have much to do with the liability to disease and suffering during the change of life. Those of weak constitutions sometimes fail of the necessary stamina to carry them easily through the trials of this transition period. It has been remarked that the lymphatic temperament is the most favorable to an easy change. Women with this temperament suffer less from nervous or bilious disorders, and quickly show signs of having been benefited by what has occurred. Those of a sanguine temperament are more liable to floodings and to head symptoms; but such disorders with them usually readily yield to treatment. The bilious temperament predisposes to disorders of the stomach and liver at this epoch; while the union of the nervous with the bilious temperament seems to predispose to mental diseases. The most suffering at this time of life is experienced by women of a nervous temperament.
The social position exerts an influence on the pain and the tendency to disease at this epoch. The poor who are forced to labor beyond their strength and who are exhausted by fatigue, anxiety, and want, suffer much. So also do those who have recently been exposed to some great sorrow. As the poet says:—
Danger, long travel, want, or woe,
Soon change the form that best we know——
For deadly fear can time out-go,
And blanch at once the hair.
Hard toil can roughen form and face,
And want can quell the eye's bright grace,
Nor does old age a wrinkle trace
More deeply than despair.