Yet she does not mean to be disagreeable; she simply cannot help it. How could she? There is a clot of blood in her womb that cannot come away; it remains and hardens and each month is added to by the banked-up blood.
It is a very sad condition, and one that often continues until a tumor is formed, or some other complication makes an invalid of her in the prime of her life――or what should be her prime.
This condition is frequently the cause of hysteria, of desperation, of a gradual mental failing.
There is another condition which goes to ruin a girl’s health and happiness, for the effects are the same as in a closed womb. There is a membrane in all chaste girls called the hymen. This closes the entrance to the vagina. Now there should always be a little opening, or several little openings in this membrane to let out the blood. In some girls this is closed from birth; so completely closed and tough that the weight of the first monthly blood cannot break through it. Then we have all the symptoms of the stoppage we have in the closed womb, only the blood packs and hardens in the lower parts instead of the womb. Often this produces greater distress than when the same conditions exist in the womb. Here great bloody tumors form and the state of the poor girl is certainly pitiable.
From birth also the womb may be closed, grown together. Then there are some girls so nervously constituted that the least touch on the muscles of the womb will shut it up spasmodically. Such a girl’s womb is not grown together, but when the first drops of blood are trying to ooze away, the womb shuts tightly. In all these cases the results to the girl is the same as I have described.
The remedy for all this misery is simple, almost painless, and will not detain you from your duties but a few days; sometimes not at all. By simply cutting or snipping apart the growth at the entrance to the organ, or opening it by a little stretching instrument, the fault is remedied; the girl cured. And all this simple knowledge could have saved thousands of suffering girls and women. No, it does not interfere with your proof of virginity. The snipping is too slight. But supposing it should? What of it, as long as you know in your own heart that your are a chaste girl? Do you want to be a miserable wreck of a woman just on account of an ancient superstition, a foolish and harmful idea of a lot of old women and medieval theologians?