But we can hardly stop there.  After we have taught the condition of health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseases specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk, exposed to an artificial mode of life.  Surely young men and women should be taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like.  They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings.  Is there one of them, man or woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to his or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about those questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of their children may every day depend?  I say—­women as well as men.  I should have said women rather than men.  For it is the women who have the ordering of the household, the bringing up of the children; the women who bide at home, while the men are away, it may be at the other end of the earth.

And if any say, as they have a right to say—­“But these are subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;” I rejoin,—­Of course not, unless they are taught by women,—­by women, of course, duly educated and legally qualified.  Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very properly object to her hearing from almost any man.  This is one of the main reasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training of women for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in my mind, all possible objections to such a movement.  And now, thank God, I am seeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save in secret—­the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which she was thrust out during the sixteenth century.

I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society, {15} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers, announces a “Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology and Hygiene, by Miss Chessar,” to which I am also most happy to see, governesses are admitted at half-fees.  Alas! how much misery, disease, and even death, might have been prevented, had governesses been taught such matters thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well.  May the day soon come when there will be educated women enough to give such lectures throughout these realms, to rich as well as poor,—­for the rich, strange to say, need them often as much as the poor do,—­and that we may live to see, in every great town, health classes for women as well as for men, sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught, not only to take care of themselves and of their families, but to exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.