If Dr. Storer will perform as noble service for our brothers and husbands as for ourselves, and send the two books out hand in hand, they will bring him back a rich harvest of gratitude, and amendment in morals. Let women feel that they are honored and appreciated, really, for their worth, not for their convenience, and the mass will not attempt to defeat the purposes of their being. For those to whom fashion is god, I have not a word to offer. Let them plead for themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] This communication, a proper supplement to Dr. Storer’s prize essay published under the above title, has been sent to us by a lady, “the wife of a Christian physician,” who has certainly expressed with exceeding delicacy and truthfulness the universal feeling of her sex upon a subject which deserves more attention from our profession than it has hitherto received. We publish it with pleasure, and wish that it might find its way, in some more popular form than our pages afford, to the eyes of every husband in the land.—Editors Medical and Surgical Journal.
WHY NOT?
A BOOK FOR EVERY WOMAN
BY
PROF. H. R. STORER, M. D.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
The American Medical Association have done a good work in authorizing the issue of this essay for general circulation. To the majority of medical men, of any large experience, of course the subject is sufficiently familiar, and the evils of forced abortions, independently of the moral obliquity of the act, are well known. But those most directly interested—the women of the country—are, as a rule, ignorant of their evil effects, and all the influence of their medical advisers has hitherto proved ineffectual to put a stop to the lamentable and criminal sacrifice of fœtal life. Curiously enough, any moral considerations of the question have little or no weight with those determined to prevent any further increase of their families,—for it is among the married that the practice obtains to the largest degree,—and it is only by direct appeals to the common sense of females, and by convincing proofs of the long train of diseases that are so sure to follow this unnatural crime, that any good results can be hoped for. This point Dr. Storer has forcibly considered, and placed the matter in its true light so far as relates to the subjects themselves.