Doctor and patient / by S. Weir Mitchell.

  • Silas Weir Mitchell
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Doctor and patient / by S. Weir Mitchell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    physiological reasoning whicli would carry me far beyond the depth of those for whom I wrote. All this I have sedulously avoided. What I shall have to say in these pages will trench but little on the mooted ground of the differences between men and women. I take women as they are to my experience. For me the grave significance of sexual difference con- trols the whole question, and, if I say little of it in words, I cannot exclude it from my thought of them and their difficulties. The woman's desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will ever really alter her char- acteristics. She is physiologically other than the man. I am concerned with her now as she is, only desiring to help her in my small way to be in wiser and more healthful fashion what I believe her Maker meant her to be, and to teach her how not to be that with which her physio- logical construction and the strong ordeals of her sexual life threaten her as no contingencies of man's career threaten in like measure or like number the feeblest of the masculine sex. 2
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