Women : their diseases and their treatment / by John King.

  • King, John, 1813-1893.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Women : their diseases and their treatment / by John King. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    freshness and charms, her beauty will rapidly fade, she will become prematurely old, and will be certain to suffer from one or more of those painful and harassing diseases peculiar to the sex. A French writer, Lachaise, remarks:—If the indispens- able processes of nature, occupied with the completion of its organization, are broken in upon by the premature enjoyments of marriage, the female will be exposed to a thousand risks in her new position. Become pregnant, she will be unable to support, without the greatest difficulty, and at the expense of her health, the innumerable and unavoidable inconveniences of that condition; she will be liable to abortions and floodings, and the pangs of childbirth may probably cost her her life. Become the mother of delicate and sickly children, she will pass her youth in uneasiness and tears; give to the offspring of her love an impoverished milk; yield herself, in order to rear them, to cares and watchings beyond her strength; hasten for them the approach of old age, and tear herself, perhaps, from life at a period when she is ordinarily strongest and most active. The proper age at which females should marry is between the nineteenth and twenty-first years, in temperate climates, and, perhaps, a year or two earlier among the inhabitants of very warm climates; at these ages the body has received its proper growth and vigor, and is capable of sustaining all those changes which a woman undergoes as a wife and as a mother. It has been said that the most effectual method of checking the ardent desires of young girls during the first years of menstruation, is for them to marry; but it must be remembered that in nine cases out often these desires are unnatural, and are artificially produced by the circumstances surrounding them, as a deficient or improper education, unhealthy associations, the reading of impure novels, vicious companions, and some of the prevailing customs of society which tend to cultivate the animal and sen- sual, rather than the mental. And in such cases, a recourse to a cooling diet and regimen, with a change of circumstances, will effect more permanent advantage than a premature mar- riage. Again, the presence of menstruation has been looked upon, and correctly too, as a general rule, as indicative of the ma-