The question of rest for women during menstruation / Mary Putnam Jacobi.

  • Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 1842-1906.
Date:
1878
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The question of rest for women during menstruation / Mary Putnam Jacobi. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    a salutary crisis intended to relieve a pathological condition induced by the excesses at table common in advanced civil- izations ; and Auber1 attributed the phenomena to the unnatural restraint imposed by these same civilizations upon the sexual instinct [see Bcigel]. According to Hageivisch, menstruation is an hereditary disease, developed by civiliza- tion, and according to Moscati, by the upright position of the human female.2 A modification of the doctrines of the Roussel school has been recently advanced by King, of Washington, who is apparently unacquainted with the argu- ments of his predecessors. He asserts that menstruation, far from affording relief to pathological conditions, itself con- stitutes a morbid state fraught with danger, inasmuch as it is proof of functional inactivity on the part of the uterus, which becomes therefore liable to atrophy by sclerosis.3 It is the function of the uterus to bear the product of concep- tion, but, impregnation not taking place, involution occurs in the membrane by fatty degeneration just as it does in the muscular walls of the womb after delivery, with this differ- ence, that it is at the beginning instead of the end of the normal function, and before the mucous membrane has at all accomplished the office for which it had been so highly developed. Thus, as has been said, a woman menstruates, only because she does not conceive. To Dr. King this remark is not merely the statement of an obvious physio- logical sequence, as when it is said that a man sleeps because he is not awake, or fasts because not employed in digestion. But he infers that since gestation is the proper function of the adult uterus, in the absence of gestation, i.e., in the presence of menstruation, the uterus is threatened with the atrophy incurred by all organs whose functions are unnat- 1 Quoted by Raciborski, Traite de la Menstruation, p. IS. s Quoted and combated by Burdach—Die Physiologie Erste Band. p. 249. 1835. 8 Am. Journ. Obst. August and Nov. 1S75.