A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach many women that by shutting themselves up day after day, week after week, in darkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a waste of health, destroying their vital energy, and diseasing their brains, as if they were taking so much poison the whole time.
For let me ask you, ladies, with all courtesy, but with all earnestness—Are you aware of certain facts, of which every excellent medical man is too well aware? Are you aware that more human beings are killed every year by unnecessary and preventable diseases than were killed at Waterloo or at Sadowa? Are you aware that the great majority of those victims are children? Are you aware that the diseases which carry them off are for the most part such as ought to be specially under the control of the women who love them, pet them, educate them, and would in many cases, if need be, lay down their lives for them? Are you aware, again, of the vast amount of disease which, so both wise mothers and wise doctors assure me, is engendered in the sleeping-room from simple ignorance of the laws of ventilation, and in the school-room likewise, from simple ignorance of the laws of physiology? from an ignorance of which I shall mention no other case here save one—that too often from ignorance of signs of approaching disease, a child is punished for what is called idleness, listlessness, wilfulness, sulkiness; and punished, too, in the unwisest way—by an increase of tasks and confinement to the house, thus overtasking still more a brain already overtasked, and depressing still more, by robbing it of oxygen and of exercise, a system already depressed? Are you aware, I ask again, of all this? I speak earnestly upon this point, because I speak with experience. As a single instance: a medical man, a friend of mine, passing by his own school-room, heard one of his own little girls screaming and crying, and went in. The governess, an excellent woman, but wholly ignorant of the laws of physiology, complained that the child of late had become obstinate and would not learn; and that therefore she must punish her by keeping her indoors over the unlearned lessons. The father, who knew that the child was usually very good, looked at her carefully for a little while; sent her out of the schoolroom; and then said, “That child must not open a book for a month.” “If I had not acted so,” he said to me, “I should have had that child dead of brain disease within a year.”