Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

There are few persons, if any, who would voluntarily act and think in a manner that would be prejudicial to their physical or moral welfare, if they were educated to a standard of knowledge that gave them an insight into the evil consequences. The law of self-preservation is innate in our natures, so that we are ready to cultivate the good and useful and shun that which may do harm.

Among the avoidable causes there is none so prolific of disease as that which is traced to the premature expulsion of the ovum or fetus from the mother’s womb.

This appears self-evident, when we stop to consider that the function of reproduction is at once by far the most complicated of the physiological processes of the female economy, so that its sudden interruption will naturally induce any one or all of the physical or pelvic ailments which we are called upon to discuss.

For our purpose it will not be sufficient to consider the subject from a medical standpoint alone, because the thoughts drift involuntarily, as it were, from the physical into the metaphysical, from the material into the spiritual part of our nature.

It is not within the scope of this work to enter upon an inquiry into the scientific evidence of the existence of the soul or advance any argument whatever in support of that doctrine, but I assume the existence of an immortal soul to be a fact.

What I will endeavor to explain is when and where this mystic union of the soul with the body takes place? Here the speculations of the medical philosophers have been contradictory, on account of attributing to the fetus different kinds of life, that is, an organic or vegetating existence attached to the mother’s womb, and as such not possessed of sentient principle, until the real or spiritual life imbues the fetus, when it becomes a living soul.

Hippocrates, the most famous physician of antiquity, who, even in the light of the nineteenth century, looms up as one of the most brilliant intellects that the world ever had, lent the weight of his judgment to this very unreasonable doctrine.

He supposed that animation occurred from thirty to forty-two days after conception.

The Stoics went still further and maintained that there was no vitality until after birth and the establishment of respiration.