involving the dreadful chances of cancer, heart disease, consumption, dyspepsia, and prolapsus, to say nothing of the hundred other specific forms of female diseases, often resulting in lifelong misery, mental agony, and early death, — and all from a variety of causes to which no man can possibly be exposed. Hence I again repeat, and without fear of successful contradiction, that at least ten times the skill is required in treating her diseases than in those of man alone.
If a man receives a blow upon the breast, he speedily recovers; not so with woman; for it may so injure her as to cause tumors, ulcers, or cancer; and if not, then the milk glands may be ruined for life; and on her ability to do justice to her child, both before and after birth, depends the inferiority or superiority of the race of men who are to rule the world hereafter. It is sad truth that I utter when I say that nine-tenths of the women of this country labor under some form of disease peculiar to them alone. They are most common and distressing, by reason of their annoyance and exhausting effects, the constant irritation, and the extreme difficulty experienced in getting rid of them when once firmly settled upon the system of the sufferers. They are common to both married and unmarried women, but far more so among the former than the latter class, owing to a variety of causes. One most distressing and depressing trouble is prolapsus of the uterus, with which most American ladies are more or less afflicted; and to be relieved of which, they often resort to very questionable means, among which are the forty thousand illiterate, money-catching quacks, — with their catholicons, balsams, pessaries, belts, and Heaven only knows how many more detestable, cruel, poisonous, inefficient, yet always unavailing and positively injurious contrivances. More than nine-tenths of woman's illnesses is the result of vital and nervous exhaustion. It comes of too hard physical labor, lifting, too frequent child-bearing, and, what is worse yet, and the principal cause of four-fifths of it, from continual domestic inquietude and fretting.
This last cause alone is productive of far more illness than would readily be believed, did not general observation and experience demonstrate it beyond all cavil. In the first place, passion's true object, so far as nature is concerned, is offspring, and whenever, wherever, and by whomsoever it is habitually and unwisely perverted to other and mere animal, not pure affectional uses, it is a
