Why do not women swim? : a voice from many waters / Ladies' National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge.

Date:
[between 1865 and 1885?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Why do not women swim? : a voice from many waters / Ladies' National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    3/16
    Wonderful women for a certain kind of zeal about health, are we English. If we meet our particular friend, we give her no saintly greetings, say nothing about mind, soul, or estate, but straightway overwhelm her with touching enquiries after the outer woman. In our social gatherings, health and the weather form the staple dishes at “the feast of reason.” We spend fortunes on doctor’s fees, and patent nostrums; and our purse, tight-clasped as it is, relaxes in a moment at the “ Open Sesame” of the vampyre-charlatans who prey upon us. We, whom the senior Mr. Weller too truly pronounced “ the soft sectf in the dual meaning of that term, make our land a very El Dorado for the greatest quacks the world has in it. Let the man be never so great a knave and dolt, if he can but tell us some bold falsehood about health, we fly to him, as foolish moths to the flame which consumes them. But our much ado about health is “ all cry and no wool;” we are a wofully unsanitary set of folk, and have yet to learn some of the very first of Hygeia’s lessons. We have yet to learn, that while we go seeking Health among the bottles and pill-boxes at the ’pothe- caries, she will, like another Robin Goodfellow, elude us at every step, and laugh at us for our pains. We have yet to learn, that in things sanitary as well as spiritual, the best blessings are obtainable “ without money and without price:” that the free gifts of air,