CHAPTER XIX
FEMININE ILLS AND THE WILL
| "Oh, undistinguished space of woman's will!" |
| King Lear |
It is probable that the largest field for the employment of the will for the cure of conditions that are a source of serious discomfort or at least of complaint is to be found among the special ills of womankind. The reason for this is that the personal reaction has so much to do with the amount of complaint in these affections. Not infrequently the individual is ever so much more important than the condition from which she is suffering. Women who have regular occupation with plenty to do, especially if they are interested in it and take their duties seriously, who get sufficient exercise and are out of doors several hours each day and whose appetites are as a consequence reasonably good, suffer very little from feminine ills, as a rule. If an infection of some kind attacks them, they will, of [{271}] course, have the usual reaction to it, and this may involve a good deal of pain and even eventually require operation. Apart from this, however, there is an immense number of feminine ills dependent almost entirely on the exaggerated tendency to react to even minor discomforts which characterizes women who have no occupation in which they are really interested, who have very little to do, almost no exercise, and whose appetite and sleep as a consequence are almost inevitably disturbed.
Above all, it must not be forgotten that whenever women do not get out into the air regularly every day—and this means for a time both morning and afternoon—they are likely to become extremely sensitive to pains and aches. This is true of all human beings. Those who are much in the open air complain very little of injuries and bodily conditions that would seem extremely painful to those living sedentary lives and who are much indoors. Riding in the open air is better than not being in the open air at all, but it does not compare in its power to desensitize people with active exercise in the open air. In the older days, when women occupied themselves very much indoors with [{272}] sewing, knitting and other feminine work, and with reading in the evenings, and when it was considered quite undignified for them to take part in sports, neurotic conditions were even more common than they are at the present time, and young women were supposed to faint readily and were quite expected to have attacks of the "vapors" and the "tantrums."
The interest of young women in sports in recent years and the practice of walking has done a great deal to make them ever so much healthier and has had not a little to do with decreasing the number and intensity of the so-called feminine ills, the special "women's diseases" of the patent medicine advertisements. Much remains to be done in this regard, however, and there are still a great many young women who need to be encouraged to take more exercise in the open than they do and thus to live more natural lives. It is particularly, however, the women of middle age, around forty and beyond it, who need to be encouraged to use their wills for the establishment of habits of regular exercise in the open air as well as the creation of interests of one kind or another that will keep them from thinking too much about [{273}] themselves and dwelling on their discomforts. These are thus exaggerated until often a woman who has only some of the feelings that are almost normally connected with physiological processes persuades herself that she is the victim of a malady or maladies that make her a pitiable object, deserving of the sympathy of her friends.
A great many of the operations that have been performed on women during the past generation have been quite unnecessary, but have been performed because women felt themselves so miserable that they kept insisting that something must be done to relieve them, until finally it was felt that an operation might do them some good. It would surely do them no harm or at least make them no worse, and there was always the possibility that the rest in the hospital, the firm persuasion that the operation was to do them good, the inculcation of proper habits of eating during convalescence might produce such an effect on their minds as would give them a fresh start in life. Undoubtedly a great many women who were distinctly improved after operations owed their improvement much more to the quiet seclusion of their hospital life, their own strong expectancy [{274}] and the care bestowed upon them under the hospital discipline without exaggerated sympathy which brought about the formation of good habits of life, than to their operation. Many a woman gained weight after an operation simply because her eating was properly directed, and this was the main part of the improvement which took place.
Operations are sometimes needed and when they are the patient will probably not get well without one; but as a distinguished neurologist, Doctor Dercum of Philadelphia, said in a paper read before the American Medical Association last year, the neurologist is constantly finding patients on whom one or several operations have been performed, some of them rather serious abdominal operations, the source of whose complaints is a neurosis and not any morbid condition of the female or other organs. Occasionally one sees something like this in men, and I shall never forget seeing at Professor Koenig's clinic in Berlin a sufferer from an abdominal neurotic condition on whom no less than three operations for the removal of his appendix had been performed, until finally Professor Koenig felt that he would be justified in tattooing over the right iliac region the words "No Appendix [{275}] Here." The condition developed in a young soldier as the result of a fall from a horse and his affection resembled very much some of the neuroses that came to be called, unfortunately, "shell shock" during the present war.
The principal trouble in securing such occupation of mind as will prevent exaggerated neurotic reactions to even slight discomforts in women is the creation for them of definite interests in life. The war taught a notable lesson in this regard. Many a physician saw patients whose complaints had been a great source of annoyance to them—and their friends—proceed to get ever so much better as the result of war interests. In one women's prison in an Eastern State, just before the war, a series of crises of major hysteria was proving almost unmanageable. By psychic contagion it had spread among the prisoners until scarcely a day passed without some prisoner "throwing a fit" with screaming and tearing of clothes and breaking of articles that might be near. Prominent neurologists had been consulted and could suggest nothing. When the war began, the prisoners were set to rolling bandages, knitting socks and sweaters and making United States flags for the army. As if by magic, the neurotic [{276}] crises disappeared. For months there were none of them. The prisoners had an abiding interest that occupied them deeply in other things besides themselves.
The reduction of nervous complaints of various kinds among better-to-do women was very striking. As might be expected, their rather strenuous occupation with war activities kept them from thinking about themselves, though it is true that now they complain about all the details that they had to care for and the lack of coöperation on the part of certain people. It would seem as though many of them had so much to do that they would surely exhaust their energies and so be in worse condition than before, but this very seldom proved to be the case. Literally many thousands of women improved in health because they became interested in other people's troubles instead of their own. David Harum once said that "It is a mighty good thing for a dog to have fleas because it keeps him from thinking too much about the fact that he is a dog." That seems a rather unsympathetic way of putting the case, but there is no doubt at all that what many women need is serious interests apart from themselves in order to prevent the law of [{277}] avalanche from making minor ills appear serious troubles.