FEMININE ILLS AND THE WILL
"Oh, undistinguished space of woman's will!"
_King Lear_.
It is probable that the largest field for the employment of the will
for the cure of conditions that are a source of serious discomfort or
at least of complaint is to be found among the special ills of
womankind. The reason for this is that the personal reaction has so
much to do with the amount of complaint in these affections. Not
infrequently the individual is ever so much more important than the
condition from which she is suffering. Women who have regular
occupation with plenty to do, especially if they are interested in it
and take their duties seriously, who get sufficient exercise and are
out of doors several hours each day and whose appetites are as a
consequence reasonably good, suffer very little from feminine ills, as
a rule. If an infection of some kind attacks them, they will, of {271}
course, have the usual reaction to it, and this may involve a good
deal of pain and even eventually require operation. Apart from this,
however, there is an immense number of feminine ills dependent almost
entirely on the exaggerated tendency to react to even minor
discomforts which characterizes women who have no occupation in which
they are really interested, who have very little to do, almost no
exercise, and whose appetite and sleep as a consequence are almost
inevitably disturbed.
Above all, it must not be forgotten that whenever women do not get out
into the air regularly every day--and this means for a time both
morning and afternoon--they are likely to become extremely sensitive
to pains and aches. This is true of all human beings. Those who are
much in the open air complain very little of injuries and bodily
conditions that would seem extremely painful to those living sedentary
lives and who are much indoors. Riding in the open air is better than
not being in the open air at all, but it does not compare in its power
to desensitize people with active exercise in the open air. In the
older days, when women occupied themselves very much indoors with
{272} sewing, knitting and other feminine work, and with reading in
the evenings, and when it was considered quite undignified for them to
take part in sports, neurotic conditions were even more common than
they are at the present time, and young women were supposed to faint
readily and were quite expected to have attacks of the "vapors" and
the "tantrums."
The interest of young women in sports in recent years and the practice
of walking has done a great deal to make them ever so much healthier
and has had not a little to do with decreasing the number and
intensity of the so-called feminine ills, the special "women's
diseases" of the patent medicine advertisements. Much remains to be
done in this regard, however, and there are still a great many young
women who need to be encouraged to take more exercise in the open than
they do and thus to live more natural lives. It is particularly,
however, the women of middle age, around forty and beyond it, who need
to be encouraged to use their wills for the establishment of habits of
regular exercise in the open air as well as the creation of interests
of one kind or another that will keep them from thinking too much
about {273} themselves and dwelling on their discomforts. These are
thus exaggerated until often a woman who has only some of the feelings
that are almost normally connected with physiological processes
persuades herself that she is the victim of a malady or maladies that
make her a pitiable object, deserving of the sympathy of her friends.
A great many of the operations that have been performed on women
during the past generation have been quite unnecessary, but have been
performed because women felt themselves so miserable that they kept
insisting that something must be done to relieve them, until finally
it was felt that an operation might do them some good. It would surely
do them no harm or at least make them no worse, and there was always
the possibility that the rest in the hospital, the firm persuasion
that the operation was to do them good, the inculcation of proper
habits of eating during convalescence might produce such an effect on
their minds as would give them a fresh start in life. Undoubtedly a
great many women who were distinctly improved after operations owed
their improvement much more to the quiet seclusion of their hospital
life, their own strong expectancy {274} and the care bestowed upon
them under the hospital discipline without exaggerated sympathy which
brought about the formation of good habits of life, than to their
operation. Many a woman gained weight after an operation simply
because her eating was properly directed, and this was the main part
of the improvement which took place.
Operations are sometimes needed and when they are the patient will
probably not get well without one; but as a distinguished neurologist,
Doctor Dercum of Philadelphia, said in a paper read before the
American Medical Association last year, the neurologist is constantly
finding patients on whom one or several operations have been
performed, some of them rather serious abdominal operations, the
source of whose complaints is a neurosis and not any morbid condition
of the female or other organs. Occasionally one sees something like
this in men, and I shall never forget seeing at Professor Koenig's
clinic in Berlin a sufferer from an abdominal neurotic condition on
whom no less than three operations for the removal of his appendix had
been performed, until finally Professor Koenig felt that he would be
justified in tattooing over the right iliac region the words "No
Appendix {275} Here." The condition developed in a young soldier as
the result of a fall from a horse and his affection resembled very
much some of the neuroses that came to be called, unfortunately,
"shell shock" during the present war.
The principal trouble in securing such occupation of mind as will
prevent exaggerated neurotic reactions to even slight discomforts in
women is the creation for them of definite interests in life. The war
taught a notable lesson in this regard. Many a physician saw patients
whose complaints had been a great source of annoyance to them--and
their friends--proceed to get ever so much better as the result of war
interests. In one women's prison in an Eastern State, just before the
war, a series of crises of major hysteria was proving almost
unmanageable. By psychic contagion it had spread among the prisoners
until scarcely a day passed without some prisoner "throwing a fit"
with screaming and tearing of clothes and breaking of articles that
might be near. Prominent neurologists had been consulted and could
suggest nothing. When the war began, the prisoners were set to rolling
bandages, knitting socks and sweaters and making United States flags
for the army. As if by magic, the neurotic {276} crises disappeared.
For months there were none of them. The prisoners had an abiding
interest that occupied them deeply in other things besides themselves.
The reduction of nervous complaints of various kinds among
better-to-do women was very striking. As might be expected, their
rather strenuous occupation with war activities kept them from
thinking about themselves, though it is true that now they complain
about all the details that they had to care for and the lack of
cooperation on the part of certain people. It would seem as though
many of them had so much to do that they would surely exhaust their
energies and so be in worse condition than before, but this very
seldom proved to be the case. Literally many thousands of women
improved in health because they became interested in other people's
troubles instead of their own. David Harum once said that "It is a
mighty good thing for a dog to have fleas because it keeps him from
thinking too much about the fact that he is a dog." That seems a
rather unsympathetic way of putting the case, but there is no doubt at
all that what many women need is serious interests apart from
themselves in order to prevent the law of {277} avalanche from making
minor ills appear serious troubles.
What most women need above all are heart interests rather than
intellectual occupations. That was why occupation with war activities
did so much good. That is the reason, too, that club life and reading
and other similar pursuits often fail to be helpful to women in their
ills to the extent that might possibly be expected. Above all, women
need interests in children and the ailing, and these can be supplied
by visits to hospitals or by taking an active interest in nurseries,
though this is often not personal enough in its appeal to catch a
woman's deepest attention. One of the great reasons why there are more
nervous diseases among women in our time than in the past is because
children are fewer, and because so many women are without children and
the calls that they inevitably make on their mothers. Unfortunately,
the traditions of the present day are to a great extent in opposition
to that family life with a number of children, which means not only
the deepest interests for woman but also such inevitable occupations
in the care of them that she has very little time to think about
herself. It may seem quixotic, that is, {278} demanding unnecessary
magnanimity to suggest that these modern ideas should be discarded by
those who wish to assure themselves such interests in middle life as
will prove definitely preventive of many neurotic conditions, but it
is manifestly the physician's duty to make such suggestions.
Life has really become full of dreads for many women in this regard. A
gradual reduction in the birth rate which has deprived so many women
of the heart interests that were particularly valuable at and after
middle life; has been the source of a great deal more suffering
without any satisfaction, than would be associated in any way with the
care of children. It is extremely unfortunate, then, that this phase
of social evolution should have taken place, for the quest of ease and
pleasure has proved a prolific source of feminine ills. It is well
recognized now that the reason for this reduction in the birth rate is
not physical but ethical. It is a matter of choice and not necessity.
There is a conscious limitation of the number of children in the
family accomplished deliberately, and as a rule the women consider
that they are justified in the procedure because they thus conserve
their own health and provide such {279} few children as they have with
healthier bodies than would otherwise have been the case.
Indeed, child-bearing beyond one or two or perhaps three children has
become a source of dread in modern times, a dread that supposedly
centers around the health of the children, as well as the mother
herself. The mother of a few children is supposed to be healthier and
the children of small families to be heartier and more vigorous than
when there are half a dozen or more children in the family. A woman is
actually supposed by many to seriously imperil her life and her health
if she has more than two or three children, though as a matter of
fact, the history of the older times when families were larger shows
us that women were then healthier on the average than they are now, in
spite of all the progress that medicine and surgery have since made in
relieving serious ills. Above all, it was often the mother of numerous
children who lived long and in good health to be a blessing to those
around her, and not the old maids nor the childless wives, for
longevity is not a special trait of these latter classes of women. The
modern dread of deterioration of vitality as the result of frequent
child-bearing is quite without {280} foundation in the realities of
human experience.
Some rather carefully made statistics demonstrate that the old
tradition in the matter is not merely an impression but a veritable
truth as to human nature's reaction to a great natural call. While the
mothers of large families born in the slums with all the handicaps of
poverty as well as hard work against them, die on the average much
younger than the generality of women in the population, careful study
of the admirable vital statistics of New South Wales show that the
mothers who lived longest were those who under reasonably good
conditions bore from five to seven children. Here in America, a study
of more favored families shows that the healthiest children come from
the large families, and it is in the small families particularly that
the delicate, neurotic and generally weakly children are found.
Alexander Graham Bell, in his investigation of the Hyde family here in
America, discovered that it was in the families of ten or more
children that the greatest longevity occurred. So far from mothers
being exhausted by the number of children that were born, and thus
endowing their children with less vitality than if they {281} had
fewer children, it was to the numerous offspring that the highest
vitality and physical fitness were given. One special consequence of
these is longevity.
In a word, the dread so commonly fostered that the mothers of large
families will weaken themselves in the process of child-bearing and
unfortunately pass on to their offspring weakling natures by the very
fact that they have to repeat the process of giving life and
nourishment to them at comparatively short intervals, is as groundless
as other dreads, for exactly the opposite is true. It is when nature
is called upon to exert her amplest power that she responds most
bountifully and dowers both children and mother with better health in
return.
Something of the same thing is true with regard to the age of mothers
when their children are born. The infant mortality is lowest among the
children of young mothers between twenty and twenty-five years of age,
though it has been found out that "delay in child-bearing after that
age penalizes the children." This is, of course, true particularly for
first children. The successive children of young mothers are known by
observation and statistics as being constantly in {282} better
condition up to the seventh. There is on the average nearly a half a
pound difference in weight at birth between succeeding children of the
same mother, so that each infant is born sturdier and more vigorous
than its predecessor.
These recently collated facts remove entirely the supposed foundations
of a series of dreads which were having an unfortunate effect upon our
population, for the natives were disappearing before the foreigners
because of the higher birth rate among the latter. Birth control has
been producing a set of unfortunate conditions for both mothers and
children. The one child in the family is sure to be spoiled, not only
as a social being but often as regards health, and conditions are
scarcely better when there are but two, especially if they are of
opposite sexes. If anything happens to them, the mother has nothing to
live for, and a little later in life the selfish beings that have been
raised under the self-centered conditions of a small family are almost
sure to be a source of anxiety and worry. Many a woman owes the
valetudinarianism of her later years to the fact that she dreaded
maternal obligations and avoided them, and so the latter part of her
life is {283} empty of most of what makes life worth living.
The will to make life useful for others rather than to follow a
selfish, comfortable, easy existence is the secret of health and
happiness for a great many women who are almost invalids or at least
constantly complaining in the midst of idle lives. A woman who has
nothing better to occupy her time than the care of a dog or two cannot
expect to have any interests deep enough to divert her attention from
the pains and aches of life that are more or less inevitable. The
opportunity to dwell on them will heighten their intensity until they
are almost torments. Many more of the feminine ills can be explained
in this way than by learned pathological disquisitions. Every
physician has seen the bitterest complaints disappear before some
change of life that necessitated occupation and gave the patient other
things to think about besides self.
The will to face nature's obligations of maternity straightforwardly
is probably the greatest preventive against the psycho-neuroses that
prove so seriously disturbing to a great many women. Their affections,
given a proper opportunity to develop, impel their {284} wills to such
activity as prevents the development of morbid states. The dreads for
themselves and their children, which so often make the excuse for a
different policy in life than this, have proved unfounded on more
careful study. Now that war activities no longer call women, it must
not be forgotten that home duties are the only ones that can serve as
a universal antidote for the poison of self-indulgence, which is much
more productive of symptoms of disease than the autointoxications of
which we have heard so much, but for which there is so little
justification in our advancing science. The assumption of serious
duties is the best possible panacea for the ills of mankind as well as
womankind, only unfortunately in recent years women have succeeded in
shirking duties more and have paid the inevitable price which nature
always demands under such circumstances, when the dissatisfaction in
life is much harder to bear than the work and trials involved in the
pursuit of duty.
{285}
INDEX
A
Achylia Gastrica, 216
Activity, intestinal, 220
Adirondacks, 183
Agoraphobia, 27
Akrophobia, 27
Alcohol,
narcotics, 191;
in pneumonia, 190;
in snake bite, 193
Alcoholic craving and food, 159
Algiers, 182
Angina pectoris, 230
Anthony, Saint, the Hermit, 21
Arctic regions, 205
Aridity, office building, 206
Aristotle, 71
Arnold, Matthew, 219
Arthritis, rheumatoid, 242
Ascesis, 77
Asceticism, 92
Asthma dread, 211
Attention, concentration of, 127
Auto-intoxication, 36
Autotoxemia, 226
Avalanche, Law of, 123
B
Babinski, 261
Bailey, Dr. Pearce, 261, 269
Bain, Professor, 51
Bell, Alexander Graham, 280
Bernheim, 252
Betel nut, 45
Birth control, 282
Bismarck, 10
Brakes on energies, 19
Bright's disease, 102
C
Cancer, 75
Cancer cures, 106
Carpenter, Doctor, 51
Cat asthma, 210
Catarrh, 31
Character, 66
Charcot, Professor, 252
Chesterfield, Lord, 224
Child bearing, 279
Chilliness, 197
Claustrophobia, 25
Coddling, 267
Conklin, Professor, 54
Consciousness,
sphere of, 230;
threshold of, 127
Consumption cures, 177
Cough remedies, 201
Coughing,
unnecessary, 199;
productive, 200
Coughs and cold air, 204
Cures, so-called, 244
D
Danger, sense of, 129
"David Harum", 276
Death Valley, 206
Dercum, Doctor, 274
Diabetes, 164
Disheartenment, 104
Dowie, John A., 253
Dreads, 278
{286}
E
"Eat and grow thin", 163
Eating, 149
Eddyism, 253
Education, liberal, 55
Effort, faculty of, 92
Eliot, George, 67
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 67
Emmet, Thomas Addis, 11, 147
Energies of men, 15
English, Thomas Dunn, 10
Euphoria, 192
Evacuation, intestinal, 221
F
Family,
large, 74;
eating, 160
Fermentation, 155
Flat foot, 141
Food and alcoholic craving, 159
Food prejudices, 152
Franklin, Benjamin, 251
Function, intestinal, 218
G
Galen, 170, 241
Galvani, 248
Gas formation, 155
Gassner, Pfarrer, 252
Giving up, 2
Gouley, John W., 11
Greatrakes, 245
H
Habits, 149
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 24
Hamlet, 82
Hard sayings, 66
Health, secret of, 283
Heart
craves exercise, 235;
interests, 277;
irregular, 236:
missed beats, 235;
regularly irregular, 237
Heredity, 169;
and environment, 54
Hoell, Father Maximilian, 252
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 40
Horace, 224
"Horse, the outside of a", 138
Humboldt, Alexander von, 9
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 54
Hyde family, 280
Hypnotism, 251
Hypochondria, 30
Hysteria, major, 275
I
Imperatives, 99
Insomniaphobia, 27
Instinct, 149
Insults, psychic, 267
Interests, feminine, 277
Intestinal stasis, 38
Intuition, 88
Invalids, chronic, 76
Isolation, 268
J
James, William, Professor, 15, 60, 77, 92
Jesuits, General of, 119
K
Koenig, Professor, 274
L
Laxatives, 219
Leo XIII, 9
Libitina, 224
Long, St. John, 171, 255
{287}
Longevity, 146
Lying, hysterical, 260
M
Maistre, Xavier De, 122
Marmalade, 222
Matthew, Father, 47
Mesmer, Friedrich Anton, 172, 250
Metallotherapy, 248
Mexican border, 60
Misophobia, 23
Mitchell, S. Weir, 11
Mollycoddle, 63
Moltke, 10
Montreal, 204
More, Sir Thomas, 266
Mothers, young, 281
Mutism, 259
N
Nansen, Fridtjof, 205
Nauheim, 233
Neuro-hypnotism, 250
New South Wales, 280
O
Obesity, 162
O'Malley, Austin, 80
Optatives, 99
Orange skin, 222
P
Pain and Refinement, 131
Pain,
control, 116;
dread of, 128
Palpitation, 228
Perkins, Elisha, 248
Personality, secondary, 88
Phthisis, 171
Physiology, study of, 35
Pneumonia, 104;
alcohol in, 190
Possession, 266
Pseudologia hysterica, 260
Psychic contagion, 275
Psycho-analysis, 41
Pueckler-Muskau, Prince, 16
Q
Quackery, History of, 245
Quinine and whisky, 201
Quitters, 169
R
Ramon y Cajal, 123
Ranke, Leopold von, 11
Repplier, Agnes, 17
Resolution, 82
Respiration spasm, 209
Rest, 57
Rheumatism, chronic, 240
Rheumatoid arthritis, 242
Riviera, 182
Roosevelt, Theodore, 118
Roughage, 220
Royal touch, 246
S
Saranac, 184
Scare, lifted, 193
Schlatter's case, 217
Self-drugging, 40
Self-pity, practice of, 70
Self-subliminal, 88
Sensation, diffusion of, 125
Sensitization, 135
Shell-shock, 64, 259
Skotophobia, 24
Smith, Stephen, 11
Snake bite, 193
{288}
Stokes, Professor, 5
Stomach functions, 215
Subconscious, 85
Suffering, 68
Sybarite, 72
T
Tantrum, 265, 272
Temperature variations, 181
Thatcher, 248
Therapeutics, absurd, 244
Thompson, William Hanna, 11
Torpillage, 264, 265
Tragedy, 71
Trait, family, 149
Trudeau, Doctor, 183
Tuberculosis, 103;
curable, 178;
early, 176;
frequency, 168;
takes quitters, 169
U
Undereating, 160
Underweight, 149
V
Valetudinarianism, 282
Vapors, 272
Virchow, Rudolf, 10
W
Weber, Sir Hermann, 146
Wellington, Duke of, 43
Wilde, Oscar, 7
Will,
and survival, 4;
conscious use, 81;
living on, 2;
omnipotent, 16;
sapping, 13
Women's diseases, 272
--------------------------
MIND AND HEALTH SERIES
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Neurologist, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. 179 pages. 12mo.
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A study of human conduct, using both the philosophical and the
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the latter method.--_A. L. A. Booklist_.
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Visiting Physician, Nervous Diseases, Boston City Hospital. 194 pages.
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The many examples that are analyzed and explained are taken from
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Popular chapters on the various theories of sleep and dreams;
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FEAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. By Boris Sidis, M.D., Director
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INSANITY AND ITS PREVENTION. By M. S. Gregory, M.D.,
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DREADS AND OBSESSIONS. By Dr. J. W. Courtney,
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Carney Hospital, Boston.
THE CONQUEST OF LAZINESS. By Arthur Holmes, Dean of
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End of Project Gutenberg's Health Through Will Power, by James J. Walsh