ysterious reasons, most profoundly human, and in weak
and nervous women this tendency is sometimes exaggerated to the actual
distortion of facts. The priest hears the crime or folly of the hour,
but to the physician are oftener told the long, sad tales of a whole
life, its far-away mistakes, its failures, and its faults. None may be
quite foreign to his purpose or needs. The causes of breakdowns and
nervous disaster, and consequent emotional disturbances and their bitter
fruit, are often to be sought in the remote past. He may dislike the
quest, but he cannot avoid it. If he be a student of character, it will
have for him a personal interest as well as the relative value of its
applicative side. The moral world of the sick-bed explains in a measure
some of the things that are strange in daily life, and the man who does
not know sick women does not know women.

I have been often asked by ill women if my contact with the nervous
weaknesses, the petty moral deformities of nervous feminine natures, had
not lessened my esteem for woman. I say, surely, no! So much of these is
due to educational errors, so much to false relationships with husbands,
so much is born out of that which healthfully dealt with, or fortunately
surrounded, goes to make all that is sincerely charming in the best of
women. The largest knowledge finds the largest excuses, and therefore no
group of men so truly interprets, comprehends, and sympathizes with
woman as do physicians, who know how near to disorder and how close to
misfortune she is brought by the very peculiarities of her nature, which
evolve in health the flower and fruitage of her perfect life.

With all her weakness, her unstable emotionality, her tendency to
morally warp when long nervously ill, she is then far easier to deal
with, far more amenable to reason, far more sure to be comfortable as a
patient, than the man who is relatively in a like position. The reasons
for this are too obvious to delay me here, and physicians accustomed to
deal with both sexes as sick people will be apt to justify my position.

It would be easy, and in some sense valuable, could a man of large
experience and intelligent sympathies write a book for women, in which
he would treat plainly of the normal circle of their physiological
lives; but this would be a method of dealing with the whole matter which
would be open to criticism, and for me, at least, a task difficult to
the verge of the impossible. I propose