Diseases of women : a clinical guide to their diagnosis and treatment / by George Ernest Herman.

  • Herman, G. Ernest (George Ernest), 1849-1914.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Diseases of women : a clinical guide to their diagnosis and treatment / by George Ernest Herman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    Strain involved in reproduction. — The change in a woman's duties, surroundings, and mode of life which marriage involves is sometimes a strain upon her nervous system, which may so weaken it as to make her ilL Preg- nancy, labour, lactation, and the care of young children are a further great strain upon the vital energies. The effect of this is seen in the frequency of puerperal insanity. This form of insanity is peculiar in depending less upon inherited tendency and more upon mental strain than any other form. This proposition is supported by the disproportionate frequency of puerperal insanity as compared with other forms of insanity occurring in women during the child-bearing age, and by the fact that the puerperal is the form of insanity which oftener than any other ends in recovery. When the cause is removed—the patient taken away from the stress of duty as a mother—her overstrained and broken mind recovers itself. Sterile marriage, if it lead, as it often does, to a disappointed, monotonous, solitary, unoccupied life, tends to mental ill-health. If living creatures, and especially human beings, the most nervous among them all, are too much cut off from communication with the outer world, there is failure in nervous power. * Now, when insanity is coming on, it is always some special organ that is com- plained of—it may be the bowel, the stomach, the womb, or the bladder. f If a failing nervous system may cause the patient to have pain and think there is disease in a perfectly healthy part; & fortiori, if there be a morbid condition which would in any person cause some local dis- comfort, this will, in a person whose nervous system is depressed, make life miserable. Fears arising from special liability to disease.—There are certain grave diseases—viz. new growths—to which the female genital organs are especially liable. Most women know this. This knowledge often makes them torture them- selves by fears lest slight local symptoms may mark the beginning of one of these terrible diseases. Every gynaeco- logical specialist sees patients who are cured when they are ' told that they-have no cancer or tumour. * Sutton, Medical Pathology, p. 447, f Ibid., p. 487.