Why Girls Are Tired.

Otago Witness, Issue 1816, 10 September 1886, Page 33

Why Girls Are Tired.

Dr R. M. Hodges, in a recent address before the Massachusetts Medical Society, said:

" The alleged over-pressure in school is, in the main, a fallacious assumption. Sound study is an advantage, if the general rules of health are attended to, and for one youthful person injured by excessive application there are a hundred whose physical condition is deteriorated by want of wholesome mental exercise. The special provocatives of ' delicate health ' in females are in great part social. The deleterious influences of a multiplicity of engagements, of the exacting demands of ambition, fashion and gaiety — and not unfrequenty an early betrothal — are intensified by the capacity for endurance which belongs to the so-called weaker sex.

" A girl can tire out her partners in the ' german ' one after another, and a feeble wife can carry her baby twice as long as her athletic husband. The more strain there is upon the strength of women, the more completely do they forget themselves and their material wants. They submit and give no signs of their emotions to the depressing influences of misfortune or an unhappy home. They suffer and are silent with what have been called 'bad-husband-headaches.' They stifle a wounded pride which is deep in proportion to the smallness of the family income, and yield to the aggressive attacks of neurotic influences (the least wearing of which may be the mental) only when the limited energy their bodies possess is exhausted, and which, when once lost, they rarely have the physical capacity or power of mechanism to replace.

" The bodies and brains of young women in the wealthiest and most luxurious circles of society constantly reveal their imperfect nutrition. Refined emaciation, fair anaemic complexions, eyes made brilliant by dilated pupils, decorous concealment of undeveloped busts and slender arms, excitable and restless temperaments — wanting sometimes in self-control, but oftener sobered by overconscientiousness — are retributive symptoms which betray a lack of blood, sleep, fresh air, and repose. Some of those who embody these conditions, delight to think that Providence has distinguished them from the common herd by certain peculiarities of constitution, and they cherish with great self satisfaction their supposed idiosyncrasies in regard to what they eat, and in reference to various habits of diet. They do not know or are unwilling to admit that 'want of tone' of which they complain, is only another name for the inertia cf exhaustion."