Traces of this wide-spread custom among primitive people, extended themselves, are discoverable among civilized lands. The famous general council of the Christian Church held at Nice in the fourth century, passed a rule disapproving of women coming to church at the times of their menstrual sickness. The cold and dampness of large edifices, the mental excitement and its unfavourable effects and the exertion requisite for long walks to and fro, would justify this rule on purely hygienic grounds, and such may have caused its adoption.
A moderate and uniform temperature favors health at such epochs; while exposure to heat or cold, and the drinking freely of iced water or stimulants should be shunned.
The popular belief that bathing is hurtful, is correct so far as either cold or hot baths are concerned; but it is well to know, in the interests of comfort and cleanliness, that a moderately warm-bath, about 80° Fahr., will do no injury. Such a bath can be taken without any hesitation.
We sanction, also, another well-known rule, and that is, that no purgative medicine should be taken immediately before or during the change. If called for by some other disorder, a mild laxative is all that should be administered, unless by the direction of a physician.
PRECAUTIONS IN THE INTERVALS OF THE MONTHLY CHANGES.
If girls suffer from irregularities in this respect, the causes can generally be found either in some affection threatening the general health, such as scrofula, consumption, green sickness, etc., or else in their mode of life. For the former, the family physician must be consulted; but if it is the latter which is at fault, the remedy is in the hands of the parents.
Boarding-school life, city life, mental troubles—these are the three fertile sources of disturbances in the sexual functions of girlhood.
No one rates at higher value than ourselves the training of the mind; but we do not hesitate a moment to urge that if perturbations of the functions become at all marked in a girl at school, she should be taken away. Better live at home in seeming idleness a year at that time of life, than become a dead-weight, through constant ill health, on her husband in after life.
So of the unwholesome excitement of a city life. There is a poison in crowds, and it acts in a thousand unseen ways. With the ceaseless noise, the broken sleep, the late hours, the impure air, and the nervous tension which all these produce, it requires no strength of imagination to perceive that the city is not the best place for the delicate girl.
We have mentioned mental troubles. Perhaps there are, among those who read this, some superficial enough to smile at the possibility of serious mental troubles in girlhood. There are, we know, many unfeeling enough to give them no attention when they do see them. But we have an unfailing witness in the sympathetic heart of the mother. She has not forgotten how bitter were the crosses of her own younger years; she knows that the sensitive soul of woman wakes early to the keenest appreciation of grief as well as joy. If anything, years blunt us, and the sorrows of youth are often the bitterest of our lives.