Female Health

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FEMALE HEALTH.

The beautiful Spring weather which now prevails renders existence in the open air delightful, and should induce all persons of sedentary habits, especially ladies, to take abundant pedestrian exercise. There can be no doubt that many of them need it badly enough. The retiring figure of a young lady seized with an attack of fainting, headache, or nausea, is a familiar sight at balls, and quite a customary object at public concerts; in the latter case causing a disturbance and confusion which mar the effect of perhaps the most interesting part of the performance. Women have no evening resorts, they do not smoke cigars, they do not spend whole evenings in drinking spirits, and for the most part, indeed, drink little of anything but tea; yet who will deny that they come down to breakfast in ill-health a great deal more frequently than men do? Cheerfulness, male and female, is a necessary condition to conjugal felicity; without it the domestic fireside is a place opposite to Heaven; but cheerfulness is incompatible with continual aches, pains, fits, qualms, and morbid nervous sensations. Such miseries induce an habitual despondency and lowness of spirits, not easily distinguishable from dissatisfaction, ill-humor and sulkiness, and truly not seldom subsiding into those unlovely moods. Yet these are the symptoms which many a husband perusing these remarks will sigh to own that he is unfortunately too well acquainted with. So characteristic, indeed, are they of that sex which, in a bodily sense, may correctly be termed the weaker vessel, that a Frenchman, M. Michelet, has lately written a book wherein he maintains that woman is essentially and always an invalid, and represents the blessedness of matrimony on the part of the husband as consisting mainly in the exercise of benevolent attentions, directed to mitigate the everlasting ailments of his wife. Affection, like virtue, is, in some measure, its own reward; and the pleasure which ever attends a kind action will, to a certain extent, remunerate the performance of a vow which binds a man to comfort and keen his spouse in sickness as well as in health; but he will find the discharge of that obligation practically a great deal more agreeable in the latter case than in the former. To keep, as well as to comfort, a spouse in sickness is, moreover, a thing more easily promised than performed by a man whose circumstances are too narrow to enable him to afford expensive medical attendance, and to hire servants to manage his household in the place of his wife, incompetent to her office. If girls were taught the general principles of medical science, they would not only be free from the disorders which are daily plagues to themselves and all around them, but also, in a great measure, exempt from those pains and perils which, if partly the punishment of “original sin,” are in a greater measure owing to actual disobedience to the physical laws. In addition, they would be enabled to preserve their infants from the greater part, or graver forms, of those maladies which render married life, in case of a family, generally one wearisome round of teething, measles, small-pox, and scarlatina.