Читать книгу The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother - George H. Napheys - Страница 21

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If girls suffer from irregularities in this respect, the causes can generally be found either in some affection threatening the general health, such as scrofula, consumption, green sickness, etc., or else in their mode of life. For the former, the family physician must be consulted; but if it is the latter which is at fault, the remedy is in the hands of the parents.

Boarding-school life, city life, mental troubles—these are the three fertile sources of disturbances in the sexual functions of girlhood.

No one rates at higher value than ourselves the training of the mind; but we do not hesitate a moment to urge that if perturbations of the functions become at all marked in a girl at school, she should be taken away. Better live at home in seeming idleness a year at that time of life, than become a dead-weight, through constant ill health, on her husband in after life.

So of the unwholesome excitement of a city life. There is a poison in crowds, and it acts in a thousand unseen ways. With the ceaseless noise, the broken sleep, the late hours, the impure air, and the nervous tension which all these produce, it requires no strength of imagination to perceive that the city is not the best place for the delicate girl.

We have mentioned mental troubles. Perhaps there are, among those who read this, some superficial enough to smile at the possibility of serious mental troubles in girlhood. There are, we know, many unfeeling enough to give them no attention when they do see them. But we have an unfailing witness in the sympathetic heart of the mother. She has not forgotten how bitter were the crosses of her own younger years; she knows that the sensitive soul of woman wakes early to the keenest appreciation of grief as well as joy. If anything, years blunt us, and the sorrows of youth are often the bitterest of our lives.

Let the mother, therefore, read with her wondrous maternal instinct the trials of her daughter; let her become her most intimate confidant, and pour upon the wounded spirit that balm which none but a woman, and that woman a mother, knows how to apply. Such a relationship of mother and daughter is no less natural and wholesome than it is beautiful.