ions of the truth of this brief monograph. It
is not asserted here that improper methods of study, and a disregard
of the reproductive apparatus and its functions, during the
educational life of girls, are the sole causes of female diseases;
neither is it asserted that all the female graduates of our schools
and colleges are pathological specimens. But it is asserted that the
number of these graduates who have been permanently disabled to a
greater or less degree by these causes is so great, as to excite the
gravest alarm, and to demand the serious attention of the community.
If these causes should continue for the next half-century, and
increase in the same ratio as they have for the last fifty years, it
requires no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be mothers
in our republic must be drawn from trans-atlantic homes. The sons of
the New World will have to re-act, on a magnificent scale, the old
story of unwived Rome and the Sabines.

We have previously seen that the blood is the life, and that the loss
of it is the loss of so much life. Deluded by strange theories, and
groping in physiological darkness, our fathers' physicians were too
often Sangrados. Nourishing food, pure air, and haematized blood were
stigmatized as the friends of disease and the enemies of
convalescence. Oxygen was shut out from and carbonic acid shut into
the chambers of phthisis and fever; and veins were opened, that the
currents of blood and disease might flow out together. Happily, those
days of ignorance, which God winked at, and which the race survived,
have passed by. Air and food and blood are recognized as Nature's
restoratives. No physician would dare, nowadays, to bleed either man
or woman once a month, year in and year out, for a quarter of a
century continuously. But girls often have the courage, or the
ignorance, to do this to themselves. And the worst of it is, that the
organization of our schools and workshops, and the demands of social
life and polite society, encourage them in this slow suicide. It has
already been stated that the excretory organs, by constantly
eliminating from the system its effete and used material, the measure
and source of its force, keep the machine in clean, healthy, and
working order, and that the reproductive apparatus of woman uses the
blood as one of its agents of elimination. Kept within natural limits,
this elimination is a source of strength, a perpetual fountain of
health, a constant ren