nerve-wounds, as irritable and hysterically emotional as the veriest
girl. If no rescue comes, the fate of women thus disordered is at last
the bed. They acquire tender spines, and furnish the most lamentable
examples of all the strange phenomena of hysteria.

The moral degradation which such cases undergo is pitiable. I have heard
a good deal of the disciplinary usefulness of sickness, and this may
well apply to brief and grave, and what I might call wholesome,
maladies. Undoubtedly I have seen a few people who were ennobled by long
sickness, but far more often the result is to cultivate self-love and
selfishness and to take away by slow degrees the healthful mastery which
all human beings should retain over their own emotions and wants.

There is one fatal addition to the weight which tends to destroy women
who suffer in the way I have described. It is the self-sacrificing love
and over-careful sympathy of a mother, a sister, or some other devoted
relative. Nothing is more curious, nothing more sad and pitiful, than
these partnerships between the sick and selfish and the sound and
over-loving. By slow but sure degrees the healthy life is absorbed by
the sick life, in a manner more or less injurious to both, until,
sometimes too late for remedy, the growth of the evil is seen by
others. Usually the individual withdrawn from wholesome duties to
minister to the caprices of hysterical sensitiveness is the person of a
household who feels most for the invalid, and who for this very reason
suffers the most. The patient has pain,--a tender spine, for example;
she is urged to give it rest. She cannot read; the self-constituted
nurse reads to her. At last light hurts her eyes; the mother or sister
remains shut up with her all day in a darkened room. A draught of air is
supposed to do harm, and the doors and windows are closed, and the
ingenuity of kindness is taxed to imagine new sources of like trouble,