Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/108

 desecration of woman's holy nature, and an outrage on the exquisite sanctities of her being!

Unwelcome "love" is no love at all. To force nature is a crime against God. The strain is too heavy on the nervous system, to say nothing about deeper parts of human nature. That's the way that some, and a good many wives are poisoned. That is the reason why so many of them mysteriously waste away, sicken, grow pale, thin, waxen, and finally quit the earth, and send their forms to early graves, — like blasted fruit, falling before half ripened. It is a terrible picture, but a true one. If poison — prussic acid or strychnine, for instance — be administered to a woman, she dies from its effects. But why? Because it enters the seat of life, changes the nature of her blood and death follows. Well, she may be poisoned quite as effectively in other ways; for she may be exhausted and die for want of nervous energy; or she may have morbid secretions, the poison of which is sure to enter the blood, until the blood is so heavily charged therewith that the disease assumes another form, while retaining the old one, and, before she is aware of it, the foul-fiend Consumption has laid siege to her lungs, or Scrofula in some of its myriad forms — from cancer to salt rheum — saps the foundation of her health forever. And yet a certain class of physicians tell us that her ailments can be cured with drugs, herb teas, bathing, magnetic treatment, electric shocks, or any one often thousand methods, — all and singular of which are as worthless and useless as a last year's almanac ; for you might as well expect an oyster to climb a tree, or to see a whale dance the polka, as to expect utter impossibilities in the direction indicated; for never, since the world began, did any such treatment cure a woman of the troubles referred to; nor is it possible unless the active and producing cause be first understood, then attacked, and finally removed. And they cannot be so removed unless she be purified and strengthened. Will herb teas do this important work? Will all the drugs ever imported — to kill patients and make doctors rich — do it? Will washing, sousing, dousing, scalding, accomplish the desired work? Will any amount of magnetizing, electrifying, or pulling, hauling, blistering, bleeding, purging, plastering, or manipulation, solve the great problem and banish these diseases? I answer most emphatically, no! Why? Because all these methods proceed upon the plan of relieving