certain utility than the advice and exhortation addressed to the
individual with such force as personal presence, backed by a knowledge
of their peculiar needs, may give. I am now, then, for the first time,
in the position of the higher class of teachers, who lay before a
multitude what will be usefully assimilated by the few.

If my power to say what is best fitted to help my readers were as large
as the experience that guides my speech, I should feel more assured of
its value. But sometimes the very excess of the material from which one
is to deduce formulas and to draw remembrances is an embarrassment, for
I think I may say without lack of modesty in statement, that perhaps
scarce any one can have seen more of women who have been made by
disease, disorder, outward circumstance, temperament, or some
combination of these, morbid in mind, or been tormented out of just
relation to the world about them.

The position of the physician who deals with this class of ailments,
with the nervous and feeble, the painworn, the hysterical, is one of the
utmost gravity. It demands the kindliest charity. It exacts the most
temperate judgments. It requires active, good temper. Patience,
firmness, and discretion are among its necessities. Above all, the man
who is to deal with such cases must carry with him that earnestness
which wins confidence. None other can learn all that should be learned
by a physician of the lives, habits, and symptoms of the different
people whose cases he has to treat. From the rack of sickness sad
confessions come to him, more, indeed, than he may care to hear. To
confess is, for mysterious reasons, most profoundly human, and in weak
and nervous women this tendency is sometimes exaggerated to the actual
distortion of facts. The priest hears the crime or folly of the hour,
but to the physician are oftener told the long, sad tales of a whole