Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

The rash and unnecessary resort to the knife has brought surgery into general distrust, so that some patients would rather die, or wait until they are almost dead, before they allow an operation to be performed on them, in cases where surgery is, indeed, the only possible method of cure.

A lady recently called at my office for a consultation. I found her uterus and other pelvic organs in a perfectly healthy condition, although she suffered pain there. This was due to neuralgia from a generally exhausted and debilitated condition. I was not a little surprised to learn, from her own lips, that she had been treated for womb disease, and was about to undergo an operation for a tear in the mouth of her womb. This was manifestly absurd, because no laceration existed at all, and if there had it might not have been necessary, because it is quite natural for women who have borne children to have the scars of old lacerations on the mouths of their wombs, and they are not any the worse for them.

It is important for mothers to know something about themselves and of the common diseases to which they are liable, for then they will not be so easily persuaded to permit the use of caustics, or the cutting, stitching, or scraping of their wombs, which is quite likely to excite complicated inflammations, more serious in their results than the diseases for which these operations were performed. I know of what I write, and there is no one who can successfully deny it.

Dr. William Goodell, who stands as high in the department of diseases of women as any American, had an article in one of the medical journals on “The Abuses of Uterine Treatment.” He says: “From a large experience I humbly offer to the reader the following watchwords as broad helps to diagnosis: 1. Always bear in mind what another has pithily said, that ‘woman has some organs outside of the pelvis.’ 2. Each neurotic case will usually have a tale of fret or grief, of cark and care, of wear and tear. 3. Scant or delayed or suppressed menstruation is far more frequently the result of nerve exhaustion than of uterine disease. 4. Anteflexion of the womb, per se, is not a pathological condition. It is so when associated with sterility or painful menstruation, and only then does it need treatment. 5. An irritable bladder is more a nerve symptom than a uterine one. 6. In a large number of cases of supposed or actual uterine disease, which display marked gastric disturbance, if the tongue be clean the essential disease will be found to be neurotic, and it must be treated so. 7. Almost every supposed uterine case, characterized by excess of sensibility and by lack of will-power, is essentially a neurosis. 8. In the vast majority of cases in which the woman takes to her bed, and stays there indefinitely, from some supposed uterine lesion, she is bedridden from her brain and not from her womb. I will go further, and assert that this will be the rule even when the womb is displaced, or it is disordered by a lesion or disease, that is not in itself exacting or dangerous to life. Finally, uterine or womb symptoms are not always present in cases of uterine disease, nor, when present and even urgent, do they necessarily come from uterine disease, for they may be merely nerve counterfeits of uterine disease.”

There is not a physician of any extended experience in the land who, if he be true to his better judgment, will not indorse every word of Professor Goodell’s propositions. But the chances are they will never accomplish the good for which they were intended if the mothers, wives, and daughters are not permitted “a little peep” behind the curtain, and learn for themselves. For those who are wealthy and have plenty of money, doctoring may be a luxury or an amusement, but there the line must be drawn for the benefit of the deserving poor, with whom any treatment is a hardship. Stupidity of the masses is one of the causes of the abuse of surgical treatments, for they always look upon a surgical or bloody operation as one of the greatest achievements of modern medical art. Then there is the cupidity of the professional classes, who trade upon this popular error and delusion, and charge correspondingly large fees, which, as a rule, are exorbitant, particularly when the working classes are the sufferers.

A little cutting or stitching is much more quickly done, and the patient may be dismissed as cured, or left under the impression “that everything was done that could have been done,” than a conservative medical or hygienic treatment, which involves more thought, labor, and patience, qualities which are not as eagerly cultivated as the art to wring out a good fee by a little surgery, with less labor and skill.

There is not only too much mischievous doctoring, but there is too much of every kind, whether good, bad, or indifferent. The trouble is there are too many in the ranks of the medical profession; and this is not only true of this country, but is raising a cry of warning in Europe. The struggle for existence is a natural law, and nature is immutable. I do not mean to say, that it is a humane law, or that competition is a virtue; in fact, I believe quite the reverse. But much that is natural from a physical standpoint might not be so from a moral or spiritual plane; thus the two natures are distinct.

It is reasonable to suppose that, if the natural crop of diseases falls short of supplying the demands of those who hunger for an opportunity to treat disease, and it lies within their power to create disease, they will certainly do so. The deficiency must be supplied, or one of two things must be done by the doctor: he must either starve, or go to work at something else. This may be cruel logic, but I know that these are the actual facts.

Now let me ask how many persons who have some sort of a diploma will be self-sacrificing enough or sufficiently unselfish to prefer to starve or honestly work for a living, if they can avoid either, by defrauding someone out of a fee, for pretending to cure some manufactured disease? It seems almost a waste of time to argue such a self-evident proposition. I have known physicians of high standing who treated women for womb diseases which never had a real existence, and surgeons of large incomes to remove the female breast for a “supposed cancer;” and, that being the case, what would you expect from a less fortunate brother practitioner who is eking out a miserable existence?

How many a case of simple sore throat or tonsilitis is being paraded as a case of diphtheria. Why, I know of doctors who built up their reputations in that way. It is quite an easy matter, to call an ordinary, simple case of bronchitis, pneumonia. Harmless swellings, no matter of what sort, are treated and palmed off every day as cancers. The quack cancer doctor is almost ubiquitous. Some would much rather part with the village parson, or their regular old town doctor, than to part with the cancer doctor. Diseases that are conjured up in the minds of susceptible or hypochondriac persons have for them a real existence, because if a person believes he has a certain disease, it becomes a reality, as far as his own state of mind is concerned, and as far as the treatment is concerned to him who created the delusion, it is much more desirable than if the disease were real, because you can cure an imaginary disease, which may be impossible when a real one comes under treatment. This is another method of making a reputation for extraordinary cures that really never occurred.