Much of this advice may seem old-fashioned to you, but in all truth it is advice founded upon the NEW experience and knowledge of all physicians who have seen the havoc wrought by carelessness and ignorance in these matters.
The womb, hanging by its delicate cords, is at this time in the girl’s life growing rapidly and consequently receiving plenty of new blood. It has not reached full development and it takes but little to put it out of place and have it stay there. The ovaries may be so twisted and put out of order that nothing can be done for them in later life but to cut them out with a knife; then you are ruined as far as womanhood is concerned.
Young age has wonderful powers of repairing injuries. If it were not so, but few would ever reach full growth. But there are some injuries youth cannot correct, and these are the distortions and displacements of woman’s sex organs――the internal ones. If you jar or tear these organs, the ovaries and womb, while you are growing, you do not know of the injury at the time. Everything at this age is strange to you in feeling and function, and slight pains in the back or groin, irregularity or too little flow, you think is nothing. But it is EVERYTHING to you when you reach the marriageable age, or when your time comes to become a mother.
The womb is pear-shaped, big end upwards. It should hang nearly straight in the body. The small end is the outlet which opens at the time the baby is to be born. It also opens slightly every month to let out the blood, then closes when it has emptied itself. Now you can readily see that if it is twisted, tipped backwards or otherwise out of shape, birth can only be given at great risk to both the babe and its mother. It may be out of place so that nothing but an operation will save life. It may be so turned backward that the child is smothered while trying to grow, and then must come a horrible operation. Even the unmarried woman will suffer from any of these misplacements of the womb. Every month the blood tries to pass off it finds obstruction; pains, griping pains occur, sometimes the blood cannot pass away but remains to cause inflammations and tumors, and unless corrected by an operation the poor woman’s life is one of torture and invalidism.