Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/377

Rh tendencies? In medicine, it is evidently partly the preventive—that is to say, by attention to health and diet, to effect the prevention of disease, especially in women and children — and partly, par excellence, healing, curing. Women have in all ages shown a remarkable talent for the healing art, have shown an ability, by herbs and the so-called domestic medicine, to cure or assuage human suffering. Their branch of medical art ought evidently to be that of the alleviation of pain; they should be the mitigators of suffering. In this they would make great progress. The instincts of the heart would be united in them with the knowledge of the head. Curative medicine would therefore be more adapted to them than surgery. And herbs, those beautiful healing herbs which stand on the hill-tops, and amid the fields, like beneficent angels beckoning in the summer winds, may be borne by the hands of the female physician into the dwellings of the sufferers, and, by means of miraculous powers called forth by love and art, may promulgate the Evangile of health more and more over the earth, and change, as much as is possible, even the so frequently terrible work of death into a peaceful transition state. Oh, to be young, to be able to devote a life to this glorious science!

Women, in all lands and in all ages, have practised the art of the physician with this aim. The work which demands more prolonged study, a more vigorous resolution, a stronger, bolder hand will in this profession, as in all others, always become the part of the man, because he is best fitted for it.

July 20th.—Here I am, still detained by events in the family whose guest I am. For only one week after the death of Mary T., she was followed to the grave by her most beloved sister; and Mr. E. T., who was to accompany me to New York, is obliged to remain here yet a few days.