If there be one set of women more liable than another to become victims of morphia or chloral, it is the wives of physicians.  Every winter I see four or five, and always it is true that the habit has arisen out of the effort of the husband to attend medically on his wife.  Physicians make good husbands, and this is in part due to the fact that their knowledge of the difficulties of feminine life causes them to be more thoughtfully tender, and more charitable as concerns the effects upon women of certain inevitable conditions as to which the layman is ignorant or indifferent.  But the very fulness of the husband’s appreciation of a woman’s drawbacks and little moral ailments, the outcome of her womanhood, becomes dangerous when he ventures to be her medical caretaker.  What he coolly decides in another’s case, he cannot in hers.  How can he see her suffer and not give her of the abundance of relief in his hands?  She is quick to know and to profit by this, and so the worst comes of it.

“It is easy for you to sit by in your strength and see me suffer,” said a woman once to me.  She was on the verge of the morphia habit, and I was trying to break it off abruptly.  I felt, as any gentle-hearted man must feel, the sting and hurt of her words.  Next day she said to me, “Of course you were right.  I used to talk that way to B——­, and he never could stand it.”  He was her husband and a physician.  She got well easily.

I do not believe that most women who sin in this way slip into it either quite so ignorantly and so unwarned as they would have you to suppose.  Nearly always there is a time when some one—­the physician, a friend, or their own reason—­bids them pause, reflect, and choose.

  “Alas I for thee, if thou from thine own soul dost turn and flee. 
  Better the house and company of pain;
  Better distress;
  Better the stones of strife, the bread with tears;
  Humiliation and despair and fears;
  All, all the heart can suffer, the soul know,
  Rather than with the bestial train to go,
  With base rejoicings, ignorant of woe."[3]

[Footnote 3:  “Sylvian, and Other Poems,” by Philip Varley.]

THE MORAL MANAGEMENT OF SICK OR INVALID CHILDREN.

Not long ago a pretty little girl of ten was brought to me from a long distance to get my advice as to a slight paralysis of one leg.  The trouble had existed for several years.  I soon saw that the child was irritable, sensitive, and positive, and I was, therefore, careful to approach her gently.  The moment it was proposed to show me the leg, she broke into a fury of rage, and no inducement I could offer enabled me to effect my purpose.  An appeal to the parents, and from them to force, ended in a distressing battle.  She bit, scratched, kicked, and at last won a victory, and was left sullen and sobbing on the floor.  Next day the same scene was repeated.  It is true that at length they were