I have not now beside me Howells's "Doctor Breen's Practice." It is a remarkable attempt to do justice to a very difficult subject, for there are two physicians to handle, male and female, not, I think, after their kind. "Doctor Zay," by Miss Phelps, makes absurd a book which is otherwise very attractive. This young woman doctor, a homoeopath, sets a young man's leg, and falls in love with him after a therapeutic courtship, in which he wooes and she prescribes.
The woman doctor is, I suspect, still available as material for the ambitious novelist, but let him beware how he deals with her.
As I look from my window, on the lawn below are girls at play,--gay, vigorous, wholesome; they laugh, they run, and are never weary. How far from them and their abounding health seem the possibilities of such torment as nature somewhere in life reserves for most of us. As women, their lives are likely, nay, certain, to bring them a variety of physical discomforts, and perhaps pain in its gravest forms. For man, pain is accidental, and depends much on the chances of life. Certainly, many men go through existence here with but little pain. With women it is incidental, and a far more probable possibility. The most healthy will have least of it. Vigor of body is its foe. Thin blood is its ally. Speaking now, not of the physiological pain, which few escape, but of the torments of neuralgia and the like, Romberg says, "Pain is the prayer of the nerves for healthy blood." As the woman is normally less full-blooded than the man, she is relatively in more danger of becoming thin-blooded than he.
Moreover, the disturbances which come from the nature of her physiological processes subject her to larger risks of lessened blood than man, and hence, for all reasons, she is more likely than he to become anæmic, and out of this to evolve pain in some shape.
If we see that our girls are not overtasked at the age of sexual evolution, that the brain is not overtrained at bitter cost of other developments as essential, we escape a part of this peril. To discuss the question here is not my intention. To secure in our artificial life what is desirable is difficult. It involves matters of dress, exercise, proportion of lessons, diet, and other matters, of which I shall yet say something, and as to which I have elsewhere said a good deal.