Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

This demonstrated fact so very often repeated, impressed upon my mind the importance of hygienic measures for the successful treatment of catarrhal inflammations, whether they are of the respiratory organs or of the female pelvic organs. The most prominent and efficacious measures are to be found in intelligent precautions for preventing colds and inuring the system to changes of temperature by appropriate outdoor exercise.

By far the greater proportion of female complaints are catarrhal inflammations, and these fasten themselves upon all the pelvic organs—on the bladder, vagina, womb and Fallopian tubes.

We generally know how we contract a bronchial catarrh or bronchitis, a nasal catarrh or sore throat; in precisely the same manner do women contract most of their pelvic catarrhs, that is, from a common cold or sudden chilling of the body or part of the body.

Dr. Thomas F. Rumbold, in his work on the “Hygiene and Treatment of Catarrh,” says: “The history of every case of chronic catarrh attests that the complaint commenced with colds in the head and that the disease grew upon the patient almost imperceptibly, the first colds being so trivial in character as to attract but little attention.”

This statement is as true of the great majority of cases of vaginal and uterine catarrh as it is of catarrhs of the air passages, and for this reason the measures and precautions for the prevention of colds must be one of the features in the successful treatment of female complaints.

The particulars of the causation of colds and the hygienic precautions for their prevention are hardly ever given the attention which their importance demands in the treatment for catarrhal complaints of women, so that a great deal of suffering is left unrelieved and a great deal of expensive and useless doctoring is endured. Altogether too much reliance is placed upon a wash or some local application made by the doctor to the affected parts, and, indeed, the mainspring of the catarrhal affection is entirely overlooked or neglected, which is, the susceptibility to the recurrence of fresh colds.

The injurious effects of taking cold or chilling the body or any part of it, have been the subject of special inquiry in Germany. The mucous membrane and the skin seem the most sensitive to sudden changes from a warm to a colder atmosphere, but observations have already proven that besides the usual catarrhal inflammations, there are other inflammatory conditions that are developed. The kidneys, lungs, and liver have been found to be the seat of inflammations in a series of experiments that were made with rabbits that were removed from a warm to a much colder apartment, and from this may be inferred that these conditions originate similarly in the human subject.

The logical conclusions of these researches have been, that the chilled or cooled blood becomes chemically altered and acts as a direct irritant in the small capillary vessels, and by that means all the phenomena of inflammation of the tissues are excited, and these of course develop wherever the cold may strike or locate.

When we speak of a slight or a bad cold, we cannot form the least idea of the remote effects that the cold may bring about. It may lay the foundation of a nephritis or Bright’s disease of the kidneys, or some other lesion, and that it often gives rise to vaginal and uterine catarrh is as certain as that it gives rise to nasal catarrh or a cold in the head.