Painless childbirth, or, healthy mothers and healthy children ; a book for women containing practical rules how the pains and perils, the difficulties and dangers of childbirth may be effectually avoided ; also, a practical consideration of the diseases of women, and their common-sense treatment, prescriptions, Etc., Etc. / by John H. Dye.

  • Dye, John Henry, -1903.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Painless childbirth, or, healthy mothers and healthy children ; a book for women containing practical rules how the pains and perils, the difficulties and dangers of childbirth may be effectually avoided ; also, a practical consideration of the diseases of women, and their common-sense treatment, prescriptions, Etc., Etc. / by John H. Dye. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    17/298 (page 17)
    present. In such cases philoprogenitiveness may be perfectly developed, and I have met many cases of the kind where women have become mothers without ex- periencing any sexual emotion whatever. There is another class in which a proper and natural degree of passion exists, while in still another, though smaller class, it exists in an unnatural degree, often amounting to nymphomania, a disease manifested by excessive erotic desires, which are controlled with great difficulty, if at all. Those of the first class, in- capable of experiencing the emotions that influence and control the latter, regard them with contempt and hatred, when pity would be far more proper. For- tunately, such abnormal conditions are amenable to proper therapeutic measures. There should be neither passion, pleasure nor pain which is not shared by both sexes. Generation is a duty; Children are a good and not an evil/' and the feelings that impel to reproduction are as much a parr of nature as is the hunger or thirst that prompts us to eat or drink. But it is a physiological fact that the moderate use of any function contributes to health, longevity and enjoyment, while excessive indulgence is punished with physical ills.* Although it is possible for conception to occur where no sexual passion is manifested, nevertheless it is true 11 that the disposition of the woman at that time has *In this consideration the author is desirous of being understood to mean reproduction under such moral and social laws as govern the peo- ple where it takes place, it not being: his intention to discuss monogamy, bigamy, polygamy or promiscuity in this work.