Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/253

 ERUPTIONS OF THE SKIN.

Most skin diseases are characterized, and indeed classified in books, by an eruption or breaking-out on the surface. These affections are so numerous, and often so difficult to distinguish apart, that it is out of the question for us to do more than glance at some which are common, and readily recognized. It would seem as if nature had designed to dash the pride of beauty by imposing on the skin of woman a greater liability to such defects. Or if you wish a less recondite cause, it is because, as a rule, she has a thinner, finer, and more sensitive skin.

She is unusually subject to such disorders at what are called in scientific language her "climacteric periods," that is, at puberty, during pregnancy, and at the change of life. Diseases peculiar to her sex lead to them with almost inevitable certainty, and the physician must first acquaint himself with her most intimate history, ere he can intelligently prepare to combat these blots on the scutcheon of beauty. Often, too, he will with the Roman general Fabius,

"Qui cunctando restituit rem,"

counsel delay as the best part of valor and the wisest act of practice. Not that he will be much afraid of "driving in" one of these eruptions. This terror belongs to an obsolete epoch of medical science. Except at the periods we have just referred to, we can