"technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely, the
technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well.

But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition of
health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseases
specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk, exposed
to an artificial mode of life. Surely young men and women should be
taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula,
consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like.
They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water,
unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, man
or woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to
his or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about
those questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of
their children may every day depend? I say--women as well as men. I
should have said women rather than men. For it is the women who have the
ordering of the household, the bringing up of the children; the women who
bide at home, while the men are away, it may be at the other end of the
earth.

And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are subjects
which can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;" I
rejoin,--Of course not, unless they are taught by women,--by women, of
course, duly educated and legally qualified. Let such teach to women,
what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very properly
object to her hearing from almost any man. This is one of the main
reasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training of
women for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in my mind,
all possible objections to such a movement. And now, thank God, I am
seeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised