repeated child-bearing, or occasional smallpox, compared
to the "over-pressure" upon "delicate organisms," which is making
the fortunes of doctors to-day?

So we argue. Yet in good truth our ancestors had their share of
pressure, and more than their share of ill-health. The stomach was
the same ungrateful and rebellious organ then that it is now. Nature
was the same strict accountant then that she is now, and balanced
her debit and credit columns with the same relentless accuracy. The
"liver" of the last century has become, we are told, the "nerves"
of to-day; which transmigration should be a bond of sympathy between
the new woman and that unchangeable article, man. We have warmer
spirits and a higher vitality than our home-keeping
great-grandmothers ever had. We are seldom hysterical, and we never
faint. If we are gay, our gayeties involve less exposure and fatigue.
If we are serious-minded, our attitude towards our own errors is one
of unaffected leniency. That active, lively, all-embracing
assurance of eternal damnation, which was part of John Wesley's
vigorous creed, might have broken down the nervous system of a
mollusk. The modern nurse, jealously guarding her patient from all
but the neutralities of life, may be pleased to know that when Wesley
made his memorable voyage to Savannah, a young woman on board the
ship gave birth to her first child; and Wesley's journal is full of
deep concern, because the other women about her failed to improve
the occasion by exhorting the poor tormented creature "to fear Him
who is able to inflict sharper pains than these."

As for the industrious idleness which is held to blame for the
wrecking of our nervous systems, it was not unknown to an earlier
generation. Madame Le Brun assures us that, in her youth,
pleasure-loving people would leave Brussels early in the morning,
travel all day to Paris, to hear the opera, and travel all night home.
"That," she observes,--as well she may,--"was considered being fond
of the opera." A paragraph in one of Horace Walpole's letters gives
us the record of a day and a night in the life of an English
lady,--sixteen hours of "strain" which would put New York to the
blush. "I heard the Duchess of Gordon's journal of last Monday," he
writes to Miss Berry in the spring of 1791. "She first went to hear
Handel's music in the Abbey; she then clambered over the benches,
and went to Hastings's trial in the Hall; after dinner, to the play;
then to Lady