The following is from the letter of an English medical lady educated on the Continent. "The exercise of the intellectual powers is the best means of preventing and counteracting an undue development of the emotional nature. The extravagances of imagination and feeling, engendered in an idle brain, have much to do with the ill-health of girls."
In the evidence given by an eminent teacher before the Royal Commission, in answer to the inquiry whether there was not some danger of injuring the health of girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen by hard study, I find the following: "I think study improves their health very much. I am sure great harm is often done by hasty recommendation to throw aside all study, when a temperate and wisely regulated mental diet is really required. They will not do nothing, but if they have not wholesome, and proper, and unexciting occupations, they will spend their time on sensational novels and things much more injurious to health. Where I have heard complaints about health as being injured by study, they have proceeded from those who have done least work at college. Indeed, I do not know of any case of a pupil who has really worked, and whose health has been injured. We have had complaints in a few cases where the girls have been decidedly not industrious." In answer to the inquiry, whether a girl's mind has not a tendency to develop more rapidly than a boy's mind, and whether, in consequence, there is not some risk of its being overstrained, the reply is, "decidedly, if the teacher is not judicious; but supposing that sufficient time is given to exercise, sleep, and recreation, then there is no danger of its being overstrained by a teacher who does not give work that the pupil does not understand. For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from a feverish love of excitement, from the irritability produced by idleness, frivolity, and discontent. I am persuaded, and my experience has been confirmed by experienced physicians, that _the want of wholesome occupation lies at the root of the languid debility of which we hear so much after girls leave school_. I have been considering the question of health somewhat of late, and I have made up from different tables some statistics about literary ladies; from one source I find that the average age to which they live is over sixty-one, and from another sixty-eight; so that I do not think learning can injure their health. Harm is often done in this way: where a pupil goes to several different teachers, one of these, ignorant of the amount required by other teachers, may give too much work, and this can only be kept balanced by care from the head teacher, who overlooks the whole."