Undercurrents of modern medicine : the annual discourse delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, June 9, 1886 / by Richard M. Hodges.

  • Richard Hodges
Date:
[1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Undercurrents of modern medicine : the annual discourse delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, June 9, 1886 / by Richard M. Hodges. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    attributes this state of things largely to innutrition* and insufficient food, and takes pains to say that par- tial and occasional starvation is not confined to chil- dren of the lowest el&NtIT The inference from these statistical facts, or from a single teacher's experience, is not necessarily that school-taxes should be devoted to dispensing new milk rather than education, though they scent to hint that a part of the public money might thus Ik- judiciously ap- propriated. Alleged overprt -Mire in schools is, in the main, it fallacious assumption. Sound study is an advantage, if the general rules of health are attended to, and for one youthful person injured by excessive application, there are & hundred whose- mental condi- tion is deteriorated by want of wholesome physical in- fluences. The H]MM-ial provocatives of “delicate health” in young females, are in great part social. The deleter- ious potency of a multiplicity of engagements, of the exacting demands of ambition, fashion and gay- ety,— and not unfrcsjuentlv of an early betrothal,— are intensified by the capacity for endurance which be- longs to the so-called weaker sex. A girl can tire out her partner* in the “ German,” one after another, and a feeble wife can carry her baby twice as long as her athletic husband. Tine more strain there is upon the strength of women, the more completely do they for- get themselves and their material wants. They sub- mit and give no signs of their emotions, to the de- pressing influences of misfortune or an unhappy home. They suffer and are silent, with what have been called “ l>ad-hu>bund headaches. They slide a wounded pride w hich i> deep in proportion to the smallm--** of the family income, and yield to the aggressive attacks of neurotic influences (the least wearing of which may H Wc*tiiiHi*»<T Jtmwry, i*wa, p. ij.