Woman, her diseases and remedies : a series of letters to his class / by Charles D. Meigs.

  • Meigs, Charles D. (Charles Delucena), 1792-1869.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman, her diseases and remedies : a series of letters to his class / by Charles D. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    'unchristian desires of my profession; I do not secretly implore 'and wish for plagues, rejoice at famines, revolve ephemendes and 'almanacks, in expectation of malignant aspects, fatal conjunctions 'and eclipses : I rejoice not at unwholesome springs, or unseason- 'able winters; my prayer goes with the husbandman's; I desire 'everything in its proper season, that neither men nor the times be 'put out of temper. Let me be sick myself, if sometimes the mala- 'dy of my patient be not a disease unto me. I desire rather to 'cure his infirmities than my own necessities: where I do him no 'good, methinks it is scarce honest gain ; though I confess it is but 'the worthy salary of our well-intended endeavors. I am not only 'ashamed, but heartily sorry, tliat besides death there are diseases 'incurable ; yet not for my own sake, or that they be beyond my 'art, but for the general cause and sake of humanity, whose com- 'mon cause I apprehend as mine own.'' Farewell. c- D- M- LETTER III. SEX. You may remember that in lectures at the college, I very fre- quently repeated that the ovary of the female gives to her the sexual character, and that as the interior and active tissue of the ovary, is the part which Ch. Ernest von Baer calls the lager or stroma, so that very stroma is the Sex itself. You might, perhaps, at first hearing this dogma, feel disposed to reject it as too concise an expression of the multitudinous and di- versified characteristics of the sexual nature—but I hope a care- ful examination of the matter may induce you to coincide with me in opinion. The sexual office is designed to reproduce the material forms and faculties of a genus or species; and this is not done save by the production of a germ, which at least, in all the Zoological series, is found within an ovum, which, in plain English, is an egg. Omne vivum ex ovo is a true saying. An ovum then is an egg—which is not to be considered as a