Hysteria : the history of a disease / by Ilza Veith.

  • Veith, Ilza.
Date:
1970, ©1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hysteria : the history of a disease / by Ilza Veith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/128 (page 18)
    example in the course of years in which the employment of calomel, etc., has cured, or even reduced in size, an ab- scess of the breast ? No ! You have not seen it, nor will you see it until Nature abandons her own laws to oblige you. Now, gentlemen, if you could see this picture as I have sketched it, you would shrink from the folly that pre- vails so largely in the profession on this matter. You may argue in justification that you have attended lectures on the practice of surgery, and that you have been taught it. Very probably you have ; but who taught the lecturers ? Believe me, the sooner you unlearn these errors the better both for your patients and your own credit, and for the honor of our profession. Presuming these principles to be unsound, however gen- erally adopted, for that is no conclusive evidence in their favor, let us now consider the subject from an opposite point of view. I assume a state of debility at starting. If you doubt my title to do so, observe and inquire. Inquire of men largely engaged in the practice of midwifery. Are strong and healthy, or are weakly women more liable to mammary abscess during lactation ? You will receive but one reply. If, then, weakness prevails in the system so universally be- fore the occurrence of the abscess, there is no escaping the inference that the weakness is the cause of the abscess, for you do not meet with cases of abscess in strong healthy women, but it selects for its victims the poor, ill fed, and impoverished. One of the worst cases I ever saw was that of a young woman in St. Bartholomew's Hospital,whose husband struggled to support a family of seven persons on