Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/480

464 and affections to which women are prone will retard them in their pursuit of a profession as a business investment. In the medical profession, to which women have a special leaning, the constant witnessing of human suffering and misery will call into play emotions which will interfere with the calm and deliberate study of each case, which its rational treatment will demand. The same objection applies to men; the medical man is rarely to be trusted to treat a difficult case in his wife, or child, or himself.

There is one fact in woman's functional life which is of vast importance to the subject of this paper, and which I refer to with great reluctance. This fact is ovulation. The mental reaction of this function is oftentimes of such a character as, for the time, to totally incapacitate for professional or other mental work. As this paper is written solely with the view of arriving at the truth in a matter of great practical importance, I must let this serve as my apology for referring plainly to this subject; and this importance requires that I let others, who are acknowledged authorities in gynæcology, speak for me.

Dr. Robert Barnes, of London, the author of the latest work upon gynæcology, uses the following unequivocal language: "The mind is always more or less disturbed. Perception, or at least the faculty of rightly interpreting perceptions, is disordered. Excitement to the point of passing delirium is not uncommon. Irritability of temper, disposition to distort the most ordinary and best-meaning acts or words of surrounding persons, afflict the patient, who is conscious of her unreason, and perplex her friends, until they have learned to understand these recurring outbursts.... Not even the best-educated women are all free from these mental disorders. Indeed, the more preponderant the nervous element, the greater is the liability to the invasion. Women of coarser mould, who labor with their hands, especially in out-door occupations, are far less subject to these nervous complications. If they are less frequently observed, if they less frequently drive refined women to acts of flagrant extravagance, it is because education lends strength to the innate sense of decorum, and enables them to control their dangerous thoughts, or to conceal them until they have passed away." Another of the accidents attendant upon ovulation is hysteria. Dr. Tilt defines it as a disease peculiar to women during the reproductive period of life, and is often known to return at each period of ovulation. This function is constantly liable to accidents. Speaking of the mental effects of æmenorrhœa, a disease to which every woman is liable who follows an intellectually rather than a physically active life, Sir J. Y. Simpson says that she becomes "subject to fits of excitement which come on most frequently at a menstrual period, and which usually assume an hysterical form, but