Intermarriage: or, the mode in which, and the causes why, beauty, health and intellect, result from certain unions, and deformity, disease and insanity, from others ... / [Alexander Walker].

  • Walker, Alexander, 1779-1852
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Intermarriage: or, the mode in which, and the causes why, beauty, health and intellect, result from certain unions, and deformity, disease and insanity, from others ... / [Alexander Walker]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    far more likely to render it fatal, when present, than to contribute towards its removal. In the third place, physiological science is of the very highest importance in the education of our race, and therefore to mothers. The following remarks of Dr. Southwood Smith, will apply equally well, to the females of this country, as those of England. “ The communication of the knowledge and the formation of the habits, which are necessary to the due perfor- mance of the duties of women, constitute no essential part of their education ; the direct tendency of a great part of their education is to produce and foster opinions, feelings, and tastes, which positively disqualify them for the performance of their duties. All would be well if the marriage ceremony, which transforms the girl into the wife, conferred upon the wife, the qualities which should be possessed by the mother. But it is rare to find a person, capable of the least difficult part of education, namely that of communicating instruc- tion, even after diligent study with a direct view to teaching; yet an ordinary girl, brought up in the or- dinary mode, in the ordinary domestic circle, is en- trusted with the direction and control of the first im- pressions that are made upon the human being, and the momentous physical, intellectual, and moral results that arise out of those impressions. Women are the earliest teachers ; they must be nurses ; they can be neither, without the risk of doing incalculable mis- chief unless they have some acquaintance with physi- ology. On these grounds, I rest their obligation to study it; and I look upon that notion of delicacy which would exclude them from knowledge calculated 2*