Chapter 3

I do not see why the whole matter could not in all colleges be systematically made part of the examinations on entry upon studies. It would at least point out to the thoughtful student his weak points, and enable him to do his work and take his exercise with some regard to consequences. I have over and over seen young men with weak hearts or unsuspected valvular troubles who had suffered from having been allowed to play foot-ball. Cases of cerebral trouble in students, due to the use of defective eyes, are common, and I have known many valuable lives among male and female students crippled hopelessly owing to the fact that no college pre-examination of their state had taught them their true condition, and that no one had pointed out to them the necessity of such correction by glasses as would have enabled them as workers to compete on even terms with their fellows.

In a somewhat discursive fashion I have dwelt upon the mischief which is pressing to-day upon our girls of every class in life. The doctor knows how often and how earnestly he is called upon to remonstrate against this growing evil. He is, of course, well enough aware that many sturdy girls stand the strain, but he knows also that very many do not, and that the brain, sick with multiplied studies and unwholesome home life, plods on, doing poor work, until somebody wonders what is the matter with that girl; or she is left to scramble through, or break down with weak eyes, headaches, neuralgias, or what not. I am perfectly confident that I shall be told here that girls ought to be able to study hard between fourteen and eighteen years without injury, if boys can do it. Practically, however, the boys of to-day are getting their toughest education later and later in life, while girls leave school at the same age as they did thirty years ago. It used to be common for boys to enter college at fourteen: at present, eighteen is a usual age of admission at Harvard or Yale. Now, let any one compare the scale of studies for both sexes employed half a century ago with that of to-day. He will find that its demands are vastly more exacting than they were,--a difference fraught with no evil for men, who attack the graver studies later in life, but most perilous for girls, who are still expected to leave school at eighteen or earlier.[1]

[Footnote 1: Witness Richardson's heroine, who was "perfect mistress of the four rules of arithmetic"!]

I firmly believe--and I am not alone in this opinion--that as concerns the physical future of women they would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked and the school hours but three or four a day until they reach the age of seventeen at least. Anything, indeed, were better than loss of health; and if it be in any case a question of doubt, the school should be unhesitatingly abandoned or its hours lessened, as at least in part the source of very many of the nervous maladies with which our women are troubled. I am almost ashamed to defend a position which is held by many competent physicians, but an intelligent friend, who has read this page, still asks me why it is that overwork of brain should be so serious an evil to women at the age of womanly development. My best reply would be the experience and opinions of those of us who are called upon to see how many school-girls are suffering in health from confinement, want of exercise at the time of day when they most incline to it, bad ventilation,[1] and too steady occupation of mind. At no other time of life is the nervous system so sensitive,--so irritable, I might say,--and at no other are abundant fresh air and exercise so important. To show more precisely how the growing girl is injured by the causes just mentioned would lead me to speak of subjects unfit for full discussion in these pages, but no thoughtful reader can be much at a loss as to my meaning.

[Footnote 1: In the city where this is written there is, so far as I know, not one private girls' school in a building planned for a school-house. As a consequence, we hear endless complaints from young ladies of overheated or chilly rooms. If the teacher be old, the room is kept too warm; if she be young, and much afoot about her school, the apartment is apt to be cold.]

The following remarks I owe to the experience of a friend,[1] a woman, who kindly permits me to use them in full. They complete what I have space to add as to the matter of education, and deserve to be read with care by every parent and by every one concerned in our public schools.

[Footnote 1: Miss Pendleton.]

"There can be no question that the health of growing girls is overtaxed; but, in my opinion, this is a vice of the age, and not primarily of the schools. I have found teachers more alive to it than parents or the general public. Upon interrogating a class of forty girls, of ages varying from twelve to fourteen, I found that more than half the number were conscious of loss of sleep and nervous apprehension before examinations; but I discovered, upon further inquiry, that nearly one-half of this class received instruction in one or two branches outside of the school curriculum, with the intention of qualifying to become teachers. I could get no information as to appetite or diet; all of the class, as the teacher informed me, being ashamed to give information on questions of the table. In the opinion of this teacher, nervousness and sleeplessness are somewhat due to studies and in-door social amusements in addition to regular school work; but chiefly to ignorance in the home as to the simplest rules of healthy living. Nearly all the girls in this class drink a cup of tea before leaving home, eat a sweet biscuit as they walk, hurried and late, to school, and nothing else until they go home to their dinners at two o'clock. All their brain-work in the school-room is done before eating any nourishing food. The teacher realized the injurious effects of the present forcing system, and suggested withdrawing the girls from school for one year between the grammar- and high-school grades. When I asked whether a better result would not be obtained by keeping the girls in school during this additional year, but relieving the pressure of purely mental work by the introduction throughout all the grades of branches in household economy, she said this seemed to her ideal, but, she feared, impracticable, not from the nature of schools, but from the nature of boards.

"A Latin graduating class of seven girls, aged seventeen and eighteen years, stated that they do their work without nervousness, restlessness, or apprehension.

"This, with other statistics, would seem to bear out your theory that after seventeen girls may study with much less risk to health.

"So far as I have observed, the strain or tear is chiefly in the case of girls studying to become teachers. These girls often press forward too rapidly for the purpose of becoming self-supporting at the age of eighteen. The bait of a salary, and a good salary for one entering upon a profession, lures them on; and a false sympathy in members of boards and committees lends itself to this injurious cramming.

"Our own normal school,[1] which is doing a great, an indispensable, work in preparing a trained body of faithful, intelligent teachers, has succumbed to this injurious tendency. We have here the high and normal grades merged into one, the period of adolescence stricken out of the girl's school life, and many hundreds of girls hurried annually forward beyond their physical or mental capacity, in advance of their physical growth, for the sake of those who cannot afford to remain in school one or two years longer. I say this notwithstanding the fact that this school is, in my opinion, one of the most potent agencies for good in the community."

[Footnote 1: Philadelphia.]

"Overpressure in school appears to me to be a disease of the body politic from which this member suffers; but it also seems to me that this vast school system is the most powerful agency for the correction of the evil. In the case of girls, the first principle to be recognized is that the education of women is a problem by itself; that, in all its lower grades at all events, it is not to be laid down exactly upon the lines of education for boys.

"The school system may be made a forceful agency for building up the family, and the integrity of the home is without doubt the vital question of the age.

"Edward Everett Hale, with his far spiritual sight, has discerned the necessity for restoring home training, and advocates, to this end, short school terms of a few weeks annually. It is probable that in the future many school departments will be relegated to the home, but the homes are not now prepared to assume these duties.

"When it was discovered that citizens must be prepared for their political duties the schools were opened; but the means so far became an end that even women were educated only in the directions which bear upon public and not upon household economy. The words of Stein, that 'what we put into the schools will come out in the manhood of the nation afterward,' cannot be too often quoted. Let branches in household economy be connected with all the general as distinguished from normal-school grades, and we not only relieve the girl immediately of the strain of working with insufficient food, and of acquiring skill in household duties in addition to the school curriculum, we not only simplify and harmonize her work, but we send out in every case a woman prepared to carry this new influence into all her future life, even if a large number of these women should eventually pursue special or higher technical branches; for we are women before we are teachers, lawyers, physicians, etc., and if we are to add anything of distinctive value to the world by entering upon the fields of work hitherto pre-empted by men, it will be by the essential quality of this new feminine element.

"The strain in all work comes chiefly from lack of qualification by training or nature for the work in hand,--tear in place of wear. The schools can restore the ideal of quiet work. They have an immense advantage in regularity, discipline, time. This vast system gives an opportunity, such as no private schools offer, for ascertaining the average work which is healthful for growing girls. It is quite possible to ascertain, whether by women medical officers appointed to this end, or by the teachers themselves, the physical capacity of each girl, and to place her where this will not be exceeded. Girls trained in school under such wise supervision would go out into life qualified to guard the children of the future. The chief cause of overwork of children at present is the ignorance of parents as to the injurious effects of overwork, and of the signs of its influence.

"The first step toward the relief of over-pressure and false stimulus is to discard the pernicious idea that it is the function of the normal school to offer to every girl in the community the opportunity for becoming a teacher. This unwholesome feature is the one distinctive strain which must be removed from the system. It can be done provided public and political sentiment approve. The normal school should be only a device for securing the best possible body of teachers. It should be technical.

"Every teacher knows that the average girl of seventeen has not reached the physical, mental, or moral development necessary to enter upon this severe and high professional course of studies, and that one year is insufficient for such a course.

"Lengthen the time given to normal instruction,--make it two years; give in this school instruction purely in the science of education; relegate all general instruction to a good high school covering a term of four years. In this as in all other progressive formative periods the way out is ahead.

"It will be time enough to talk of doing away with a portion of the girls' school year when the schools have fulfilled their high mission, when they have sent out a large body of American women prepared, not for a single profession, even the high feminine vocation of pedagogy, but equipped for her highest, most general and congenial functions as the source and centre of the home."

I am unwilling to leave this subject without a few words as to our remedy, especially as concerns our public schools and normal schools for girls. What seems to me to be needed most is what the woman would bring into our school boards. Surely it is also possible for female teachers to talk frankly to that class of girls who learn little of the demands of health from uneducated or busy or careless mothers, and it would be as easy, if school boards were what they should be, to insist on such instruction, and to make sure that the claims of maturing womanhood are considered and attended to. Should I be told that this is impracticable, I reply that as high an authority as Samuel Eliot, of Massachusetts, has shown in large schools that it is both possible and valuable. As concerns the home life, it is also easy to get at the parents by annual circulars enforcing good counsel as to some of the simplest hygienic needs in the way of sleep, hours of study, light, and meals.

It were better not to educate girls at all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, unless it can be done with careful reference to their bodily health. To-day, the American woman is, to speak plainly, too often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which nowadays she is eager to share with the man?

While making these stringent criticisms, I am anxious not to be misunderstood. The point which above all others I wish to make is this, that owing chiefly to peculiarities of climate, our growing girls are endowed with organizations so highly sensitive and impressionable that we expose them to needless dangers when we attempt to overtax them mentally. In any country the effects of such a course must be evil, but in America I believe it to be most disastrous.

As I have spoken of climate in the broad sense as accountable for some peculiarities of the health of our women, so also would I admit it as one of the chief reasons why work among men results so frequently in tear as well as wear. I believe that something in our country makes intellectual work of all kinds harder to do than it is in Europe; and since we do it with a terrible energy, the result shows in wear very soon, and almost always in the way of tear also. Perhaps few persons who look for evidence of this fact at our national career alone will be willing to admit my proposition, but among the higher intellectual workers, such as astronomers, physicists, and naturalists, I have frequently heard this belief expressed, and by none so positively as those who have lived on both continents. Since this paper was first written I have been at some pains to learn directly from Europeans who have come to reside in America how this question has been answered by their experience. For obvious reasons, I do not name my witnesses, who are numerous; but, although they vary somewhat in the proportion of the effects which they ascribe to climate and to such domestic peculiarities as the overheating of our houses, they are at one as regards the simple fact that, for some reason, mental work is more exhausting here than in Europe; while, as a rule, such Americans as have worked abroad are well aware that in France and in England intellectual labor is less trying than it is with us. A great physiologist, well known among us, long ago expressed to me the same opinion; and one of the greatest of living naturalists, who is honored alike on both continents, is positive that brain-work is harder and more hurtful here than abroad, an opinion which is shared by Oliver Wendell Holmes and other competent observers. Certain it is that our thinkers of the classes named are apt to break down with what the doctor knows as cerebral exhaustion,--a condition in which the mental organs become more or less completely incapacitated for labor,--and that this state of things is very much less common among the savans of Europe. A share in the production of this evil may perhaps be due to certain general habits of life which fall with equal weight of mischief upon many classes of busy men, as I shall presently point out. Still, these will not altogether account for the fact, nor is it to my mind explained by any of the more obvious faults in our climate, nor yet by our habits of life, such as furnace-warmed houses, hasty meals, bad cooking, or neglect of exercise. Let a man live as he may, I believe he will still discover that mental labor is with us more exhausting than we could wish it to be. Why this is I cannot say, but it is not more mysterious than the fact that agents which, as sedatives or excitants, affect the great nerve-centres, do this very differently in different climates. There is some evidence to show that this is also the case with narcotics; and perhaps a partial explanation may be found in the manner in which the excretions are controlled by external temperatures, as well as by the fact which Dr. Brown-Séquard discovered, and which I have frequently corroborated, that many poisons are retarded in their action by placing the animal affected in a warm atmosphere.

It is possible to drink with safety in England quantities of wine which here would be disagreeable in their first effect and perilous in their ultimate results. The Cuban who takes coffee enormously at home, and smokes endlessly, can do here neither the one nor the other to the same degree. And so also the amount of excitation from work which the brain will bear varies exceedingly with variations of climatic influences.

We are all of us familiar with the fact that physical work is more or less exhausting in different climates, and as I am dealing, or about to deal, with the work of business men, which involves a certain share of corporal exertion, as well as with that of mere scholars, I must ask leave to digress, in order to show that in this part of the country at least the work of the body probably occasions more strain than in Europe, and is followed by greater sense of fatigue.

The question is certainly a large one, and should include a consideration of matters connected with food and stimulants, on which I can but touch. I have carefully questioned a number of master-mechanics who employ both foreigners and native Americans, and I am assured that the British workman finds labor more trying here than at home; while perhaps the eight-hour movement may be looked upon as an instinctive expression of the main fact as regards our working class in general.

A distinguished English scholar informs me that since he has resided among us the same complaints, as to the depressing effects of physical labor in America, have come to him from skilled English mechanics. What share change of diet and the like may have in the matter I have not space to discuss.[1]

[Footnote 1: The new emigrant suffers in a high degree from the same evils as to cookery which affect only less severely the mass of our people, and this, no doubt, helps to enfeeble him. The frying-pan has, I fear, a better right to be called our national emblem than the eagle, and I grieve to say it reigns supreme west of the Alleghanies. I well remember that a party of friends about to camp out were unable to buy a gridiron in two Western towns, each numbering over four thousand eaters of fried meats.]

Although, from what I have seen, I should judge that overtasked men of science are especially liable to the trouble which I have called cerebral exhaustion, all classes of men who use the brain severely, and who have also--and this is important--seasons of excessive anxiety or of grave responsibility, are subject to the same form of disease; and this I presume is why we meet with numerous instances of nervous exhaustion among merchants and manufacturers. The lawyer and clergyman offer examples, but I do not remember to have seen many bad cases among physicians. Dismissing the easy jest which the latter statement will surely suggest, the reason for this we may presently encounter.

My note-books seem to show that manufacturers and certain classes of railway officials are the most liable to suffer from neural exhaustion. Next to these come merchants in general, brokers, etc.; then less frequently clergymen; still less often lawyers; and more rarely doctors; while distressing cases are apt to occur among the overschooled young of both sexes.

The worst instances to be met with are among young men suddenly cast into business positions involving weighty responsibility. I can recall several cases of men under or just over twenty-one who have lost health while attempting to carry the responsibilities of great manufactories. Excited and stimulated by the pride of such a charge, they have worked with a certain exaltation of brain, and, achieving success, have been stricken down in the moment of triumph. This too frequent practice of immature men going into business, especially with borrowed capital, is a serious evil. The same person, gradually trained to naturally and slowly increasing burdens, would have been sure of healthy success. In individual cases I have found it so often vain to remonstrate or to point out the various habits which collectively act for mischief on our business class that I may well despair of doing good by a mere general statement. As I have noted them, connected with cases of overwork, they are these: late hours of work, irregular meals bolted in haste away from home, the want of holidays and of pursuits outside of business, and the consequent practice of carrying home, as the only subject of talk, the cares and successes of the counting-house and the stock-board. Most of these evil habits require no comment. What, indeed, can be said? The man who has worked hard all day, and lunched or dined hastily, comes home or goes to the club to converse--save the mark!--about goods and stocks. Holidays, except in summer, he knows not, and it is then thought time enough taken from work if the man sleeps in the country and comes into a hot city daily, or at the best has a week or two at the sea-shore. This incessant monotony tells in the end. Men have confessed to me that for twenty years they had worked every day, often travelling at night or on Sundays to save time, and that in all this period they had not taken one day for play. These are extreme instances, but they are also in a measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.

Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. There are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those troubles,--one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most active labor.