Fat and Blood | Page 9

else some local uterine trouble
starts the mischief, and, although this is cured, the doctor wonders that
his patient does not get fat and ruddy again.
But, no matter how it comes about, whether from illness, anxiety, or
prolonged physical effort, the woman grows pale and thin, eats little, or
if she eats does not profit by it. Everything wearies her,--to sew, to
write, to read, to walk,--and by and by the sofa or the bed is her only

comfort. Every effort is paid for dearly, and she describes herself as
aching and sore, as sleeping ill and awaking unrefreshed, and as
needing constant stimulus and endless tonics. Then comes the
mischievous role of bromides, opium, chloral, and brandy. If the case
did not begin with uterine troubles, they soon appear, and are usually
treated in vain if the general means employed to build up the bodily
health fail, as in many of these cases they do fail. The same remark
applies to the dyspepsias and constipation which further annoy the
patient and embarrass the treatment. If such a person is by nature
emotional she is sure to become more so, for even the firmest women
lose self-control at last under incessant feebleness. Nor is this less true
of men; and I have many a time seen soldiers who had ridden boldly
with Sheridan or fought gallantly with Grant become, under the
influence of painful nerve-wounds, as irritable and hysterically
emotional as the veriest girl. If no rescue comes, the fate of women thus
disordered is at last the bed. They acquire tender spines, and furnish the
most lamentable examples of all the strange phenomena of hysteria.
The moral degradation which such cases undergo is pitiable. I have
heard a good deal of the disciplinary usefulness of sickness, and this
may well apply to brief and grave, and what I might call wholesome,
maladies. Undoubtedly I have seen a few people who were ennobled by
long sickness, but far more often the result is to cultivate self-love and
selfishness and to take away by slow degrees the healthful mastery
which all human beings should retain over their own emotions and
wants.
There is one fatal addition to the weight which tends to destroy women
who suffer in the way I have described. It is the self-sacrificing love
and over-careful sympathy of a mother, a sister, or some other devoted
relative. Nothing is more curious, nothing more sad and pitiful, than
these partnerships between the sick and selfish and the sound and
over-loving. By slow but sure degrees the healthy life is absorbed by
the sick life, in a manner more or less injurious to both, until,
sometimes too late for remedy, the growth of the evil is seen by others.
Usually the individual withdrawn from wholesome duties to minister to
the caprices of hysterical sensitiveness is the person of a household

who feels most for the invalid, and who for this very reason suffers the
most. The patient has pain,--a tender spine, for example; she is urged to
give it rest. She cannot read; the self-constituted nurse reads to her. At
last light hurts her eyes; the mother or sister remains shut up with her
all day in a darkened room. A draught of air is supposed to do harm,
and the doors and windows are closed, and the ingenuity of kindness is
taxed to imagine new sources of like trouble, until at last, as I have seen
more than once, the window-cracks are stuffed with cotton, the
chimney is stopped, and even the keyhole guarded. It is easy to see
where this all leads to: the nurse falls ill, and a new victim is found. I
have seen an hysterical, anæmic girl kill in this way three generations
of nurses. If you tell the patient she is basely selfish, she is probably
amazed, and wonders at your cruelty. To cure such a case you must
morally alter as well as physically amend, and nothing less will answer.
The first step needful is to break up the companionship, and to
substitute the firm kindness of a well-trained hired nurse.[12]
Another form of evil to be encountered in these cases is less easy to
deal with. Such an invalid has by unhappy chance to live with some
near relative whose temperament is also nervous and who is impatient
or irritable. Two such people produce endless mischief for each other.
Occasionally there is a strange incompatibility which it is difficult to
define. The two people who, owing to their relationship, depend the
one on the other, are, for no good reason, made unhappy by their
several peculiarities. Lifelong annoyance results, and for them there is
no divorce possible.
In a smaller number of cases, which have less tendency to emotional
disturbances, the phenomena are