Because what I shall write is meant for popular use rather than for my own profession, I have made my statements as simple as possible.  Scarcely a fact I state, or a piece of advice I give, might not be explained or justified by physiological reasoning which would carry me far beyond the depth of those for whom I wrote.  All this I have sedulously avoided.

What I shall have to say in these pages will trench but little on the mooted ground of the differences between men and women.  I take women as they are to my experience.  For me the grave significance of sexual difference controls the whole question, and, if I say little of it in words, I cannot exclude it from my thought of them and their difficulties.  The woman’s desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will ever really alter her characteristics.  She is physiologically other than the man.  I am concerned with her now as she is, only desiring to help her in my small way to be in wiser and more healthful fashion what I believe her Maker meant her to be, and to teach her how not to be that with which her physiological construction and the strong ordeals of her sexual life threaten her as no contingencies of man’s career threaten in like measure or like number the feeblest of the masculine sex.

THE PHYSICIAN.

I have long had in mind to write from a physician’s point of view something in regard to the way in which the well-trained man of my profession does his work.  My inclination to justify the labors and sentiments of an often misunderstood body of men was lately reinforced by remarks made to me by a very intelligent patient.  I found him, when I entered my room, standing before an admirable copy of the famous portrait of the great William Harvey, the original of which is in the Royal College of Physicians.  After asking of whom it was a likeness, he said, “I should be a little curious to know how he would have treated my case.”

I had to confess that of Harvey’s modes of practice we know little, but I took down from a shelf those odd and most interesting letters of Howell’s, clerk of council to James I., and turned to his account of having consulted Harvey on returning home from Spain.  Only too briefly he tells what was done for him, but was naturally most concerned about himself and thus missed a chance for us, because it so happens that we know little of Harvey.  At this page of Howelliana was a yellow paper-marker.  Once the book was Walpole’s, and after him was Thackeray’s, and I like to fancy that Walpole left the marker, and that Thackeray saw it and left it, too, as I did.

My patient, who liked books, was interested, and went on to say that he had seen several physicians in Europe and America.  That in France they always advised spas and water-cure, and that at least three physicians in America and one in London had told him there was nothing the matter with him, and that finally a shrewd country doctor had remarked bluntly that he would not give him any medicine, because he was overdosed already with work and worries, which was true.