Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/234

222 in its working by slight causes. The calls on the inherent vital energy to carry on and to bring to the harmonious perfection of full womanhood all these combined bodily and mental qualities I have referred to, during these ten or twelve years, is very great indeed.

We physicians maintain that this period is one of momentous importance, and we have good reason to know this, for we are often called on to treat diseases that arise then, and, having originated then, have been fully matured afterward. The risks and the dangers to body and mind are then very great indeed. We count it a fearful risk to run, not merely that actual disease should be brought on, but that a girl capable of being developed into a healthy and happy woman, with a rounded feminine constitution after Nature's type the only type that secures happiness and satisfaction to a woman should by bad management, misdirected education, or bad conditions of life, grow into a distorted, unnatural, and therefore unhappy woman, who can not get out of the life that she has only to live once all that it is capable of yielding her. Like all the other physiological eras of life, that of adolescence only comes once. If the developing process, which is its chief characteristic, is not completed, then it is missed for life. Whatever is done then is final; whatever is left undone is also final. If a woman is not formed at twenty-five, the chances are she will never be so; if she is not healthy then, she probably will not be so. Who in his senses can deny that it is far better for nineteen women out of twenty to be healthy than to be intellectually well educated? No acquirements of knowledge can possibly make up for health in afterlife. There is an organic happiness that goes only with good health and a harmoniously constituted body and mind. Without that organic happiness life is not worth having. Cheerfulness is one of the best outward signs of this perfect health, and what woman has not missed her vocation in the world who is not cheerful? A general sense of well-being is the best conscious proof of perfect health. It underlies all enduring happiness. It means good and harmonious development of mind and body, properly working functions, and satisfied organic needs. Any method of education that impairs this must be bad and one-sided.

Here it may be necessary to correct a too common notion that the brain only subserves mental work. To hear the common expression "brain-work," one would imagine that muscular exercise, ordinary employments, and digestion, could go on without the brain's working at all. No idea could be more mistaken. The brain is a most complicated organ in structure and function, that regulates the working of every portion of the body, that has certain portions of it devoted to motion and feeling, and passion, and digestion, and body-growth, and nutrition, etc. It is the one organ that dominates all the others, regulating and harmonizing all their functions. If one side of it is injured during growth, the opposite side of the body is left stunted