At our next interview she brought with her a gentleman whom she introduced to me as her husband. The meeting was to me wholly unexpected, but most happy. She lived in this relation, but without progeny, a few years more, and then sank in a decline, to rise no more till the sound of the last trumpet.
Of the particulars of her decline and death, I have never heard a word. Her scrofulous temperament and tendencies rendered her liable to numerous diseases of greater or less severity and danger, to some of which she probably fell a victim. It is, however, by no means impossible that her numerous cares and anxieties—for she was naturally very sensitive—may have hastened her exit.
If I have any misgivings in connection with this protracted, but very interesting case, and consequently any confessions to make, it is with reference to the point faintly alluded to in a preceding paragraph. While I honor, as much as any man, the marriage relation,—for it is in accordance with God's own intention, and is the first institution of high Heaven for human benefit and happiness,—I must freely confess that in the present fallen condition of our race, it occasionally happens that an individual is found unfit for the discharge of its various duties, as well as for the endurance of some of its peculiar responsibilities. Such, as I believe, among others, was Mary Benham.
CHAPTER LXII.
FEMALE HEALTH, AND INSANE HOSPITALS.
A female, about thirty-five years of age, and naturally of a melancholic temperament, was very frequently at my room for the purpose of conversing with me in regard to her health. Most of her complaints—for they were numerous—were grafted upon a strongly bilious habit, and were such as required in the possessor and sufferer, more than an ordinary measure of attention to the digestive organs and the skin. And yet both these departments, especially the latter, had been in her case, hitherto, utterly neglected. To speak plainly, and with some license as a physiologist, she had no skin. It was little more than a mere wrapper, so far as the great purposes of health were concerned. A dried and even tanned hide, could it have been fitted to her person with sufficient exactness, would have subserved nearly the same purposes.
Perhaps you will excuse the tendency in the description of this case, to exaggeration, when you are informed that the treatment of themselves, in the particular here alluded to, by females especially, is one which habitually fills one with disgust, and sometimes with indignation. Persons of good sense, of both sexes, who from month to month, perhaps from year to year, never wash their skins, nor use much muscular exercise, ought to know that they must, sooner or later, experience the dreadful penalty attached to violated physical law, and from which there is, neither on earth nor in heaven, any possible escape. Can any one suppose, for a moment, that so curious and complicated an organ as the skin, and one of such considerable extent, has nothing to do?
Nearly every living person has some idea, of greater or less intensity, of pores in the skin; at least, they use language which implies such an idea. They talk, often, of the necessity of keeping these pores open. But how is it to be done? Not certainly while they use little or no muscular exercise, by washing, once a day, their hands and faces merely, or, as some say, their fingers, their noses, and the tips of their chins. They may talk, on occasions, very boldly and flippantly, about sweating away a cold, as they term it; but do they vainly suppose that the sweat vessels or sweating machinery has nothing to do, from day to day, which might prevent the necessity of resorting to these sweating processes?