A treatise on the diseases and special hygiène of females / By Colombat de l'Isère. Translated from the French, with additions, by Charles D. Meigs.

  • Colombat de l'Isère, 1797-1851.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the diseases and special hygiène of females / By Colombat de l'Isère. Translated from the French, with additions, by Charles D. Meigs. 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.

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    appears to attach herself to every thing about her.^ The new sensa- tions arising within her soul make her timid in approaching the com- panions of her childhood ; a strange trouble, a tort of restlessness, an agitation before unknown, are the heralds of a power whose existence she does not even suspect. The action of the new forms of vitality established within the sexual organs augments more and more, and reacts with energy upon the whole system. Under the sympathetic irradiations of the uterus the general sensibility becomes changed and even excited in a peculiar manner. A new sentiment soon gives rise to desires which, as yet, have no definite object, and to vague emotions, of an instinct that seeks some object—if knows not what. This rising want produces the impression of a touching melancholy, a charming bashfulness, whose principle is founded in ingenuous love, presaging new dispo- sitions, and announcing that the inclinations and habits of childhood are exchanged for other sentiments. The young virgin becomes timid, reserved, abstract and dreamy. She sighs less for pleasure than for happiness; the necessity of loving makes her seek solitude— and this new want, that troubles her heart and engages it wholly, be- comes, if it remain unsatisfied, a source of multiplied disorders and derangements. Various causes calculated to render the play of the vital forces more active, have the effect either of retarding or precipitating the age of puberty: thus, abundant and stimulating food and drinks, manners, habits and climate, exercise a marked influence upon this vital phenomenon. Certain moral circumstances may likewise acce- lerate its arrival; but the artificial maturity thus resulting always acts injuriously upon the organization : among these circumstances may be enumerated premature passions and pleasures, the arts of imi- tation, music, painting, the perusal of obscene romances, the inspection of lascivious pictures, the theatre and the ball-room ; the bad examples and the premature libertinism, of which too many samples are unfor- tunately furnished in great cities. These specimens of premature puberty, the miserable consequence of too great vivacity of the ima- gination, are sometimes met with as early as the eighth or tenth year. The normal puberty that is announced by the eruption of the menses, is, in our climate, not generally observed before the fifteenth or sixteenth year; but its period is different according to the region in which the subject lives. In southern countries, for example, as in Greece, Italy and Spain, under the beautiful skies of Provence or Languedoc, young girls are often found to be grown up at twelve or sixteen years of age; and in certain Asiatic countries, heated by a burning sun, the young women become marriageable as early as the tenth or eleventh year. In the cold latitudes, on the contrary, as in Sweden, Norway or Lapland, it is not uncommon for the women to be as late as the twentieth or twenty-fifth year before the eruption of the menses, or even still later. In general, the crisis of puberty is more trying for females than for males, especially for those who are endowed with a very delicate and nervous constitution, as often happens to such as lead a sedentary