Puberty and adolescence medico-psychologically considered / by T.S. Clouston.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Puberty and adolescence medico-psychologically considered / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    functions of the brain from the exhausting calls of menstruation, maternity, and lactation, from the nervous reflex influences of ovulation, conception, and parturition, are ruinous if there is the slightest original predisposition to derangement, and the normally profound influences on all the brain functions of the great eras of puberty and the climacteric period are too apt, in these circum- stances, to upset the brain stability. Beyond all doubt, boarding- school education has not as yet been conducted on physiological principles, and is responsible for much nervous and mental derangement, as well as for difficult maternity; but if the educa- tion of civilized young women should become what some educa- tionalists would wish to make it, all the brain energy would be used up in cramming a knowledge of the sciences, and there would be none left at all for trophic and reproductive purposes. In fact, for the continuance of the race there would be needed an incursion into lands where educational theories were unknown, and where another rape of the Sabines was possible. American physicians tell us that there are some schools in Boston that turn out young ladies so highly edu- cated that every particle of their spare fat is consumed by the brain-cells that subserve the functions of cognition and memory. If these young women do marry, they seldom have more than one or two children, and only puny ones at that, whom they can't nurse, and who either die in youth or grow up to be most feeble- minded folks. Their mothers had not only used up for another purpose their own reproductive energy, but also most of that which they should have transmitted to their children ; nature, no doubt, making provision for the transmission of the unused-up energy of one generation on to the next, on the principle of the con- servation of force. As physicians—the priests of the body and the guardians of the physical and mental qualities of the race—we are, beyond all doubt, bound to oppose strenuously any and every kind and mode of education that in any way lessens the capability of woman for healthy maternity, and the reproduction of future genera- tions strong mentally and physically. The relation of the psychical and emotional development to the generative function is full of in- terest and importance to us as physiologists, and few men have been long in practice before such questions obtrude themselves as very practical ones indeed. The first hysterical girl a man has to treat in a good family where he does not want to lose the case or the family practice, may test severely his knowledge of the reflex relation- ship of the uterus with the sensory, motor, and mental functions of the brain. We must, as much as we can, account for phenomena of all kinds. It is a mere cloak for ignorance, and an excuse for not thinking, to call certain abnormal phenomena hysterical, and imagine that explains them. It does not require much considera- tion to see that at the period of puberty in both sexes, but especi- ally in the female, the direct connexion of certain physiological