physics herself nor others. And to cultivate in things
pertaining to health observation and experience in women who are
mothers, governesses or nurses, is just the way to do away with amateur
physicking, and if the doctors did but know it, to make the nurses
obedient to them,--helps to them instead of hindrances. Such education
in women would indeed diminish the doctor's work--but no one really
believes that doctors wish that there should be more illness, in order
to have more work.

[Sidenote: What pathology teaches. What observation alone teaches. What
medicine does. What nature alone does.]

(2.) It is often said by women, that they cannot know anything of the
laws of health, or what to do to preserve their children's health,
because they can know nothing of "Pathology," or cannot "dissect,"--a
confusion of ideas which it is hard to attempt to disentangle. Pathology
teaches the harm that disease has done. But it teaches nothing more. We
know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology
is the negative, except from observation and experience. And nothing but
observation and experience will teach us the ways to maintain or to
bring back the state of health. It is often thought that medicine is the
curative process. It is no such thing; medicine is the surgery of
functions, as surgery proper is that of limbs and organs. Neither can do
anything but remove obstructions; neither can cure; nature alone cures.
Surgery removes the bullet out of the limb, which is an obstruction to
cure, but nature heals the wound. So it is with medicine; the function
of an organ becomes obstructed; medicine, so far as we know, assists
nature to remove the obstruction, but does nothing more. And what
nursing has to do in either case, is to put the patient in the best
condition for nature to act upon him. Generally, just the contrary is
done. You think fresh air, and quiet and cleanliness extravagant,
perhaps dangerous, luxuries, which should be given to the patient only
when quite convenient, and medicine the _sine qua non_, the panacea. If
I have succeeded in any measure in dispelling this illusion, and in
showing what true nursing is, and what it is not, my object will have
been answered.

Now for the caution:--

(3.) It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women
themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the
want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other thi