Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

But for all that, there is a legitimate and scientific specialty of women’s diseases. The time-serving specialist must be exposed in every department of medical science. Whether the pretender is labeled, a professor in a college, or labels himself through glaring newspaper advertisements, one is just as much a catch-penny as the other.

The object of educating the laity cannot be reasonably confined to a few medical truths, but the perversion of the truth must also be understood, so that the false can be detected. It is necessary to point out the dangers and frauds which are the unhealthy outgrowths or excrescences of established truths, and there must be no veneering of the wicked and sinful with ambiguous phrases to shield the guilty; the truthful and innocent require no apologist.

The honest observer can pursue no middle way in a work to which he has devoted the best years of a studious life, and hence he may seem radical in his opinions. While policy often dictates a conservative course, that which conscience and reason dictate to be true is prompted by loftier motives, namely, to subserve the highest purpose of moral integrity.

It has often been said that this is a mechanical age. How true is this even in the furtherance of science! How true is this of the science of astronomy, which was revolutionized by the construction of good telescopes! Mechanical genius has perfected a lens for Mount Hamilton thirty-six inches in diameter, and one is now in course of construction for Mount Wilson, in Southern California, which is to measure forty inches. Through these means scientists hope to decipher the complexion of remote planets.

Microscopic lenses have been equally perfected, and, by means of achromatic condensers and immersion lenses, great magnifying power can be obtained with perfect distinctness. That this mechanical spirit of the age should also have obtained a foothold in medical art and science, is but natural. Surgical and other mechanical methods have entered so boldly into the field of diseases of women that the writer feels constrained to sound a note of alarm. Great strides have been made in a more perfected technique in abdominal operations, and, by favorable recoveries from grave and severe operations, the field of surgical usefulness became enlarged, but this has degenerated into a license for notoriety and personal aggrandizement of not over-scrupulous and selfish surgeons who are over-anxious to operate so as to be able to boast of the great number of their capital operations, or laparotomies.

I was enthusiastic in abdominal and pelvic surgery, but not until I entered the field as a specialist in this department of medicine did I see and hear of daily abuses and misuses of this branch of surgery. In many instances it degenerated into criminal malpractice. It will be instructive information to cite a few cases which occurred under my observation, and present the actual facts to the reader.

It was in the month of February, in the year 1888, that a business trip to the southern part of the State forced an absence of several weeks upon me. Some two months before this time I had been called to see a young woman, who had then been sick for several months. She informed me that she had been married nine years, and, not having had any children, she concluded to see a noted specialist of female diseases. By this physician she was told that her sterility was owing to a closure or contraction of the mouth of the womb. This was obviously a wrong diagnosis, and for these reasons: she had always menstruated regularly and without pain, which excludes a constriction; and, secondly, no physician can honestly call a woman sterile until he has examined her husband, who, in the majority of instances, is the cause of his wife’s sterility, because it is he who is sterile. This woman and the doctor agreed, however, on a course of treatment, which was to forcibly open or stretch the mouth and cervical canal of the womb. This by itself is neither a dangerous nor a severe operation, if carefully performed, but care in this case was evidently not exercised, because the young woman was taken with severe inflammation, which caused a pelvic abscess.

I found her after two months of suffering. The discharge had become extremely offensive, her body emaciated, and her strength exhausted.

I enlarged the opening of the abscess, placed a large drainage tube in the cavity, through which it was washed out, by means of an antiseptic solution of bichloride of mercury, 1 part to 2,000 parts of water, and, by further giving her simple, nutritious food, she improved rapidly, so that the day before I left the city she was at my office, and told me that she felt as well as ever, although not thoroughly recovered. I was absent two weeks, and a few days after my return I incidentally met her husband, who told me that a week after I had left, his wife felt unwell and called in one of her former doctors, who, by the way, rides a hobbyhorse on surgery. This man found a few pimples on her body, which can be found on almost any healthy person, these, he said, were signs of blood poisoning from her abscess, and that an operation to extirpate the abscess, with one or both of her ovaries, was of urgent necessity to save her life from blood poisoning. The deceived woman was of course frightened into giving her consent to the operation, which was undertaken immediately, and, as luck would have it, she recovered; but she might have easily died, which she undoubtedly would have done had this knife-man got her sooner, or before I had restored to her a splendid physical condition, which withstood the unnecessary butchery to which she was induced to submit.

Some doctors seem to have a perfect mania for cutting operations, just as though the entire science and art of medicine were exhausted in surgery alone. To assume this for an instant is manifestly ridiculous. More lives are annually saved by a scientific application of other methods of cure than the most elaborate and brilliant statistics of surgery can approach. There is science and skill in selecting proper medicines, in the employment of hygiene or the rules of health, in the practice of obstetrics, and in a variety of other ways to demonstrate the triumphs of the art of healing.