A treatise on the special diseases of women and their electropathic treatment / The Medical Battery Company Limited.

Date:
[1891]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the special diseases of women and their electropathic treatment / The Medical Battery Company Limited. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    our school system provide no information on these topics, which so vitally concern the happiness of every individual, but the slightest allusion to the subject is apt to be rigorously prohibited and perhaps branded as obscenity. There is a great deal of igno¬ rance in these questions, and a still greater amount of half knowledge, which is more dangerous than either total ignorance or the fullest information. We have the authority of Sir James Paget for this state¬ ment, that some grow up and even marry in complete sexual ignorance, and while this is rare in the male sex, it is extremely common among cultivated and refined women. The decent veil which we conspire to throw over everything connected with the repro¬ ductive function, serves beyond doubt some useful ends, and we trust the English people will always be characterised by their delicacy of thought and expression in this matter. But we are convinced that this secrecy—this conspiracy of silence—has gone too far, and that it is productive of serious evils. We object to it in the first place as unnatural. That our educational methods and social practice should permit men, and more frequently women, to marry without knowing what marriage involves, is not merely unnatural, but may be the cause of much matrimonial unhappiness. Parents act as if inno¬ cence in such matters could last for a life, and as if knowledge were a crime. But a much more serious, because infinitely more common, evil, is the objection-
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