WOMAN, THE PHYSICIAN.

Mankind can never have a comprehensive view of any subject, until the mind of woman has been brought to bear upon it, equally with that of man. The two sexes have separate points of view; different thoughts, feelings, and modes of judgment; and no theory of life, nor of any part of it, can be complete, till the distinct views of each have been formed on it, and mutually compared. The religion, the morality, the duties of woman, differ no less from those of man, than their bodily organisation, and the states of health and disease, to which it is subject. No religion, no moral or physical code, proposed by one sex for the other, can be really suitable; each must work out its laws for itself in every department of life. Therefore have women, properly speaking, at present no religion, physical or moral, no morality, and no medicine. They trust to man for these, unaware that themselves alone can solve their life's problem in its minutest particular. I am aware of the great progress, in various directions, which many of the sex have lately made, but there still remains an immensity to be done, as none feel more than they do. Women have hitherto been content to regard the universe and themselves through men's eyes; and their self-consciousness is thus very imperfectly developed. The attainment of self-consciousness is to. be gained in the same way as that of man, only by discovering their moral, intellectual and physical relations to all parts of nature. Hence there is no subject, which man has conceived or shall conceive and pursue; which woman should not also conceive and pursue according to her peculiar powers. Until she shall do this, neither she nor man will have a full or natural conception of the whole, as one of the grand sexual paths towards it will be unexplored.

There is no department of knowledge, from which woman has been more debarred than from medicine. If it was often thought unadvisable for man to penetrate the mysteries of the body, for woman it was held almost a sacrilege. The narrow ideal which our imperfect conceptions have shaped for woman-of purity, modesty, love, and grace, which are supposed to constitute her peculiar and sufficient sphere-revoltø

from the very thought of her engaging in pursuits of presumedly so opposite a character. In all ages all nations has the development of woman been crippled and impeded by man's interference. Like the Chinese bandaging, and the Turkish prison-house, does their conventional character at the present day among ourselves confine their natural energies and prevent their expansion. Innocence, purity, chastity, delicacy let us rather read ignorance, morbidity, disease, and misery: how long shall this semblance of a moral character hang about the neck of woman? Does nature move thus with downcast eye, and sidelong regard, fearing everywhere to encounter objects it is ashamed to meet? No; the front of nature is calm, open, and fearless: her steady gaze penetrates everywhere beneath the sun, and if man or woman would be in harmony with her, they must emulate her fearless deportment. Hence should neither woman nor man shrink from the view of decay and death; they should meet them boldly and by wrestling with them, learn to embrace them too in their sympathies, to know that they are as sublime and beautiful parts of our being as any other. Who can value an existence spent in hiding from the presence of the inevitable, which will meet us in every step through life? By our knowledge of the destructive side of nature, and our acknowledgment of its equal justice and beauty, we are brought into harmony with the whole; while without this knowledge our characters remain most imperfect. This side has ever been assiduously hidden from woman in other things as well as in medicine, and thus has her character suffered infinitely.

No pursuit would have a better effect in restoring the balance of the female character than medicine, in which the destructive processes meet us on the very threshold, and command our most devoted attention. Nothing could be better adapted for unspiritualising woman, as well as man, and for restoring her to the realities of life and of the material universe. Here is the scene of our human joys and sorrows; our real trials and triumphs. Ah! not for woman only, but for all of us, is mother earth our paradise, our everlasting abode, our heavens, and our infinity! It is not by leaving it, and our real humanity behind us, and sighing to be anything but what we are, that man will become ennobled or immortal. Is this our gratitude for all that has been done for us, for the grandeur and sublimity by which our life is surrounded?

But medicine does not rest its claims on woman's reverential study, any more than on man's, merely on the feeble grounds of expediency. It is not the "rights" of woman that are concerned, but her duties. On her as well as on man, the study of her physical part and its laws, is enjoined by nature, as a religion and a duty, second to none in its claims. All those who do not study them, as is the case with all women, and nearly all men in the present day, live a life of sin, and are under the ban of nature. Ignorance of the physical laws is in woman no less culpable than in man; and nature has no excuse for the softer sex for any breach of them. Gallantry and cumbrous chivalry enter not into her code towards them; she does not load them with lip service, and yet deny them access to her heart's recesses. She lies there, open and inviting to the gaze, with one calm and impartial front turned towards both sexes alike.

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 sarctioned 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? Da 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

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