Part 16 (1/2)
2 Drink when thirsty, having conveniently at hand the facilities for drinking.
3 Heed the call to stool as you heed the call of hunger. When the stool pa.s.ses the little valve between the upper and lower portions of the r.e.c.t.u.m, it gives the signal that the time for evacuation has come. If this signal is always heeded, it will automatically start the machinery that leads to evacuation. If it is persistently ignored because one is too busy, or because the mind is filled with the idea of disability, the call very soon fails to rise to the level of consciousness. The feces remain in the r.e.c.t.u.m, and the bad habit is begun.
4 Choose a regular time and keep that appointment with yourself as regularly as possible. In all the activities of Nature, there is a rhythm which it is well to observe.
5 Take time to acquire the habit. Do not be in a hurry. Do not strain. No amount of effort will start the movement. Just let it come of itself.
6 Finally, should the unconscious suggestion of lack of power stubbornly remain in force, take a small enema on the third day. If the waste matter acc.u.mulates for three or more days, the bulk becomes so great that the circular muscles of the r.e.c.t.u.m are unable to handle it, just as the fingers cannot squeeze down to expel water from too large a ma.s.s of wet blankets. Take only a small enema-never over a quart at a time-and expel the water immediately. One or two such measures will bring away the ma.s.s in the r.e.c.t.u.m. The material farther up still contains food elements and is not yet ready for expulsion. Lessen the amount of water each time until no outside help is needed. Once you get the right idea, all enemas will be superfluous.
Summary
If you would have in a nutsh.e.l.l an epitome of the truth about constipation, indigestion, insomnia, and the other functional disturbances common to nervous folk, you can do, no better than to commit to memory and store away for future reference that choice limerick of the centipede, which so admirably sums up the whole matter of meddlesome interference:
A centipede was happy quite Until a frog in fun Said, ”Pray, which leg comes after which?”
This raised her mind to such a pitch, She lay distracted in the ditch, Considering how to run.
Whoever tries to consider ”which leg comes after which” in any line of physiological activity, is pretty sure to find himself in the ditch considering how to run. Wherefore, remember the centipede!
CHAPTER XII
In which handicaps are dropped
A WOMAN'S ILLS
”The Female of the Species”
If ever there was a man who wished himself a woman, he has hidden away the desire within the recesses of his own heart. But one does not have to wait long to hear a member of the female s.e.x exclaim with evident emotion, ”Oh, dear, I wish I had been born a man!” It is probable that if these same women were given the chance to transform themselves overnight, they would hesitate long when it actually came to the point. The joys of being a woman are real joys. However, in too many cases these joys seem hardly to compensate for the discomforts of the feminine organism. It is the body that drags. Painful menstrual periods, the dreaded ”change of life,” various ”female troubles” with a number of pregnancies scattered along between, make some of the daughters of Eve feel that they spend a good deal of their lives paying a penalty merely for being women. Brought up to believe themselves heirs to a curse laid on the first woman, they accept their discomforts with resignation and try to make the best of a bad business.
”Since the War.” Nothing is quite the same since the war. Among other things we have learned that many of our so-called handicaps were nothing but illusions,-base libels on the female body. Under the stern necessity of war the women of the world discovered that they could stand up under jobs which have until now been considered quite beyond their powers. Society girls, who were used to coddling themselves, found a new joy in hard and continuous work; middle-aged women, who were supposed to be at the time of life when little could be expected of them, quite forgot themselves in service. Ambulance drivers, nurses, welfare workers, farmerettes, Red-Cross workers, street-car conductors and ”bell-boys,” revealed to themselves and to the world unsuspected powers of endurance in a woman's body. Although some of the heavier occupations still seem to be ”man's work,” better fitted for a man's st.u.r.dier body, we know now that many of these disabilities were merely a matter of tradition and of faulty training.
There still remains, however, a goodly number of women who are continuously or periodically below par because of some form of feminine disability. Some of these women are suffering from real physical handicaps, but many of them need to be told that they are disabled not by reason of being women but by reason of being nervous women.
”Nerves” Again. Despite the organic disturbances which may beset the reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal diseases, it may be said with absolute a.s.surance that the majority of feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the female body, nor even of man's infringement of the social law, but are the direct result of false suggestion and of false att.i.tudes toward the facts of the reproductive life. The trouble is less a difficulty with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with the reproductive instinct. ”Something wrong” with the instinct is translated by the subconscious mind into ”something wrong” with the related generative organs, and converted into a physical pain.
That this relation has always been dimly felt is shown by the fact that the early Greeks called nervous disorders hysteria, from the Greek word for womb. It is only lately, however, that the blame has been put in the right place and the trouble traced to the instinct rather than to the organs of reproduction.
Why Women Are Nervous. Although women hold no monopoly, it must be conceded that they are particularly p.r.o.ne to ”nerves.” The reason is not hard to find. Since the leading factor in a neurosis is a disturbance of the insistent instinct of reproduction, a disturbance usually based on repression, then any cla.s.s of persons in whom the instinct is particularly repressed would, in the very nature of the case, be particularly liable to nervousness.
No one who thoroughly knows human nature would attempt to deny that woman is as strongly endowed as man with the great urge toward the perpetuation of the race, or that she has had to repress the instinct more severely than has man. The man insists on knowing that the children he provides for are his own children. Whatever the degree of his own fidelity, he must be sure that his wife is true to him. Thus has grown up the insistence that, no matter what man does, woman, if she is to be counted respectable, shall control the urge of the instinct and live up to the requirements of continence set for her by society.
Unfortunately, however, there is more often blind repression than rational control. The measures taken to prevent a girl's becoming a tom-boy are measures of s.e.x-repression quite as much as of s.e.x-differentiation. Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal s.e.x-development. Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence, while it really implies a s.e.x-curiosity which has been too severely repressed. The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the young man is filled with a sense of dignity. We smile at the picture of ”Miss Philura's” confusion as she hesitatingly sends up to her Creator a pet.i.tion for the much-desired boon of a husband. But really, why shouldn't she want one? Many a young woman, in order to deaden her senses to the unsuspected lure of the reproductive instinct by what is really an awkward attempt at sublimation, makes a fetish of dress and social position and considers only the marriage of convenience; or, on the other hand, she scorns men altogether and throws herself into a ”career.”
Young men are not so often taught to repress, but neither are they taught to swing their vital energies into altruistic channels through sublimation. Since the woman of his cla.s.s will not marry him until he has money, the young man too often satisfies his undirected instincts in a commercial way. The statistics of venereal diseases prove that here, as elsewhere, goods subject to barter are subject to contamination. In a late marriage, too often a contaminated body accompanies the material possessions which the standards of society have demanded of a husband.
But the woman pays in still other coin for the repressions arising from faulty childhood training. Unable to find expression for herself either in marriage or in devotion to work, because some old childish repression is still denying all outlet to her legitimate desire, she frequently falls into a neurosis; or if she escapes a real breakdown, she gives expression to unsatisfied longings in some isolated nervous symptoms which in many cases center about the organs of generation. There then results any one of the various functional disturbances which are only too often mistaken for organic disease. What is needed in cases like this is not a gynecologist nor a surgeon, but a psycho-pathologist-or perhaps only a grasp of the facts. Let us look at the more common of these disturbances in order to gain an understanding of the situation.
The Menstrual Period