The consequences of the want of physical reverence and knowledge in woman, have been as disastrous, perhaps more so, than in man. The ignorance and carelessness of women, in all things appertaining to their bodily welfare, is proverbial, and the despair of the physician. Men may perhaps, as has been said, be brought to attend to their stomach when death is staring them in the face; but to make woman attend to her bodily state, and reverence the laws of health in her own person, is too often a hopeless endeavour. But in all things, in all matters in life, this want of the feeling of duty to themselves, which is so often erroneously praised under the name of unselfishness, characterises women. They have never deeply thought or felt what it is right for themselves to do what are the laws of their being, moral or physical, which they must obey. They have taken the will of man for their law, instead of that of nature; and yielded to him with little thought of their own duties. They have sanctioned by their apathy towards all other objects, the fallacious words of the poet, that "man is made for God only, woman for God in him." Does this deserve man's gratitude or approbation? would he then wish to absorb in himself woman's thoughts, and allegiance, jealous of the claims of all the rest of nature which demands no less her love, jealous of her attention and reverence for the laws of her own being? Alas! such has been and is too much the case; but this jealousy is a most narrow and mistaken feeling. We cannot be happy, unless woman be happy; and it is impossible she can be so, if she do not study and reverence her relations to the rest of nature as well as to us. Nature will not be neglected for man; and it demands her love. Can we love nature for woman? can we live her life, bear her penalties for error, die her death for her? If a woman do not herself possess moral and physical knowledge, which are inseparable from a genuine love of nature; if she do not possess them of herself and for herself, will all the knowledge on these subjects that was ever possessed by man, bear her safely through her life? Nothing can ever come to us from another, everything we have we must owe to ourselves; our own spirit must vitalise it, our own heart must feel it for we are not passive machines-women, any more than men who can be lectured, and guided, and moulded this way and that; but living beings, with will, choice, and comprehension, to be exercised for ourselves at every step in life,

All the sciences, all the arts, wait at present for woman's hand and thought, to give them new life and impulses; and none solicit her attention more imperatively than medicine. The physical organisation of woman is, in many respects, different from that of man; their physical lives are different, their healthy and diseased sensations different. If the merely objective consideration gives one man so imperfect an idea of another, how much more imperfect must be his idea of woman, based on similar grounds? We cannot explain woman; her diseases, many of which are quite peculiar to her sex, are a mystery to us, which no objective reasoning will ever resolve. Woman alone, by her trained self-consciousness, can represent to us her peculiar sensations, and when these are disordered, it is she alone who possesses in her own sex the healthy standard, wherewith to com

pare them. When she relies on man to explain or to cure her, she leans on a broken reed. Nay, more than this, it is a sad error for either man or woman to believe, that it is the part solely of the physician to cure them. Men and women must equally co-operate in their cure; there is no royal road to health, nor is it often to be obtained by the mechanical pouring of medicine down the throat. Here, as in all other parts of life, it is to be regarded as the reward of individual exertion; our own body must labour for it, and our own reason and good endeavours must co-operate to the best of our powers. To throw the whole responsibility on the medical shoulders, is an evil which leads to the most ruinous results.

Each sex has a relation of objective reasoning to fulfil towards the other. Each has to reason for the other on all subjects; criticise, and endeavour to mould the other, according to its conceptions of what is just and good; and in every way strive to present to the other as complete as possible a picture of the aspect it bears towards itself. But, hitherto, man only has thus reasoned on woman. Man has been for ages shaping his model of the female physically and morally; dwelling upon, and endeavouring to elevate, and perfect her ideal, as it appeared to him. In medicine too, man alone has reasoned on woman; she has never ventured to think for him, and to render him his portrait in return. How much men lose by this, has been deeply felt in the moral world, where there are constant complaints, that woman, with regard to man, knows not her own mind, and therefore, that all men come in a manner alike to her. She will not criticise, or at least not reflectively, and, therefore, little dependence can be placed in her judgment of men, which is guided in great measure by caprice or conventionalities. In medicine this is even more the case than in morals; and not till woman shows her care for us by the keen investigation of our physical part with all its healthy and diseased states, shall we have a satisfactory picture of our wondrous twosexed humanity. Does woman's heart never prompt her to this? is she never urged by the sight of the sufferings or death of those near and dear to her, to make herself something more than a cup-bearer in the sick room? Does intense love never suggest to her that there may be secrets in nature, kept for her solution alone, which tardy science would without her slowly or never reach? Do these things never awake in her an earnest determination, that will make its way through all obstacles, to work for those she loves, and for mankind, regardless of the wonder or stare of those, whose laugh would soon be hushed to a prayer for her? For a fountain of admiration for virtue and noble endeavour springs perennial in the human breast, and never yet did man trust to it and was deceived.

• But rarely, alas! too rarely, does woman succeed in choosing for herself an independent path. She is yet too weak from the swaddling clothes, and can scarcely be expected to surmount the great obstacles which obstruct her freedom in almost every direction. When the first glow of self-reliance and independence, kindled by her intense feelings, has passed, doubts and irresolution succeed; the old woman, trained in long passive habits, and dependence on the opinion of others, re-asserts its sway; and

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after a sad and agonising struggle, she falls back into the accustomed beaten tracks, and her noble aspirations for the unknown and untried are dissolved like the melting vapour. "How should she presume to think for herself; how did she ever imagine she had the power to open up, or the privilege to enter upon a new world; why was she disturbed by elevating thoughts, she whose soul was so conscious of its own weakness and utter nothingness? The very wish to serve mankind, and develope herself in unaccustomed ways, was a deadly sin, showing the secret presumption of the heart, and the pride of the intellect. Oh, no! humility and gentle submission were her element; and love and contrition, not bold aspirings, her duty;" and thus is she in all probability, sooner or later absorbed into the Christian ideal, which by the mesmerism of the supernatural fascinates all those who lose their self reliance. For the power exercised by any dogmatic belief, whose essential characteristic ever is, that it reposes on faith, not on reason, is in exact proportion to the want of self-reliance of an individual in his own reason. Those who propose such doctrines, and those who receive them, alike forget, that the propositions they subscribe to are absolutely impossible; that there is no such thing as faith, not grounded on reason. Individual reason, good or bad, right or wrong, is at the bottom of every one's nature, and a man or woman's religion, right or wrong, must always be their own, whether they will or not, and cannot be that of any other.

Instead of urging woman onwards on the untrodden paths of new virtue and enterprise, Christianity tends greatly to keep her back, in the same way that it prevents men in general from reverencing duly the body. If the salvation of her soul by entertaining certain beliefs, and educating her mind and her life on certain all-absorbing feelings of love, purity, and devotion-if this be the one grand necessity for her, the all-sufficient crown of her existence, why imperil it by seeking to develope herself, or benefit mankind by such dangerous paths, as medicine; or, to give another example of a so-called unfeminine pursuit, the stage? Are not both professions more or less degraded in the eyes of men, and shall she not share in their degradation? are they not, especially for woman, scandalous, if not unheard of? what shall she gain by exposing herself to all the trials, temptations, seductions, and materialising influences which surround them, compared to the one thing needful, she endangers by the attempt? But more than this, does not the study of medicine, besides the mysteries of the body, with its sexualities, its putrescences, all of these subjects from which her uncultivated imagination has hitherto shrunk in alarm or disgust, does it not necessitate an acquaintance with the various habits and diseases, brought on by every vice, every sin of man and woman? Must not the venereal and genital diseases of both sexes be revealed to her eye, and studied with unaverted gaze? Must not she mix and converse with every class of human beings, with the debauchee of the one sex, and the prostitute of her own?

Yes, all this must she do, and far, far more besides. She must learn to shrink from nothing, and from no human being. She must learn to regard all with an equal love and reverence, totally irrespective of

their actions; for in this consists the true character of the physician of the soul or the body-not to hate and reproach any, but to love and succour all. Does the true physician refuse to devote equal care to the worst case of sin or disease, as to the least? Nay, he loves and tends it, even the more, the more it requires his love. The true friend of man turns the same face of benevolence towards all; towards all, his endeavours are the same; namely, to benefit them to the utmost of his ower.

SUBJECTIVE MEDICINE.

one.

Every human life has a two-fold aspect, a subjective and an objective The first is the view it presents to an individual's self; the other, to those around him. In order that we may have a comprehensive knowledge of any individual, we must enter into both these views. Medicine, which embraces the whole physical life of man in health and disease, is also naturally divided into these two parts, both of which are equally necessary to render the science complete. One part of the knowledge of an individual's physical state, is to be got by the observation of the physician; the other can come only from the revelation of the individual himself.

Now in the latter part, namely, in subjective medicine, the science is as barren and incomplete, as was that of religion or morality, before nen began to think for themselves on these matters. Neither in medical works, nor elsewhere, have we anything at all approaching to satisfactory subjective descriptions of disease. Very few medical men have ever thought of allowing their patients to speak for themselves in their reports of cases. Intent chiefly on arriving at physical facts and physical conclusions, they have paid comparatively slight attention to the mental state of the patient, which forms no less integral a part of the disease. Thus, in questioning a patient, they strove as much as possible to bring him to the physical point, checking his digressions, and the outpourings of his suffering heart. It is this want of sym

pathy and value for the mental part of the disease, and the mere attention to the physical, that has proved one of the chief barriers between medical men and the public. But it is no less the physician's duty to embrace in his reverence and scientific attention the mental element, than it is that of the moralist to embrace the physical. Both have suffered equally from the omission, and such a division of labour in so indissoluble a compound as man, cannot but lead to the most imperfect results.

Every one must have felt, in reading medical works, the dull and mechanical tone, which the want of the subjective element imparts. 1nstead of the intense glow of life and individuality, with which each stamps his own soul's or body's tragedy, in a personal narrative, we have all pruned down to a sober routine list of facts and symptoms,