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CHAPTER XI.

The reasoner will at once look for the cause, while the unfortunate sufferers are testing the remedies.

Since all ages and both sexes are sufferers, we are surprised that no more remote causes than the crying of infants, and the severe toil of adults should be mentioned.

Here is a telling illustration of the truth, that women cannot suffer without men being sufferers also. The ordinary style of woman's dress so debilitates the pelvic organs of woman, that they are more of less prolapsed, as also are her abdominal viscera, the bowels. The whole of the organs of generation in women are weakened by their clothing. No petticoats, corsets, whalebones of any fastenings around the waist can be worn without injury to woman's abdominal and pelvic viscera. Men could not wear the ordinary clothing of women without injury, but it would be far less injurious to them than to women, because they have not women's pelvic organs to prolapse, to displace or otherwise injure.

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But while women dress in this way, their sons are injured through them, to such an extent that many are born with inguinal hernia. In some cases it does not appear until a year or two of age. In a large number of instances, the membraneous tissue over the bowels and the muscular tissue over them, are so weakened that hernia is the sure result, from over work, a misstep, or from even less causes. When men evolve out of their might of ignorant oppression of scientific women who are dressing hygienically and use their influence and money to further general enlightment and practice of the true object of clothing, their sons and grandsons will be free from the sure tendency to hernia and not until then; it matters not what they may think regarding an ignorant standard of "taste," that is made by equally ignorant courtesans and adopted by them, not as a principle of dress, for ever-changing fashions cannot be principles. A reform dress is an embodiment of a principle; and as "principles are eternal," men will have the satisfaction ere long, to find that principles cannot be destroyed by any sort of oppression, but the real patriots and the true philanthropists, will join with the philosophers is establishing the same.

Dr. Nonot, the leading man of the profession in Paris, wrote the author a letter, in which he speaks of the ordinary arrangement of woman's clothing

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being one of the most fruitful causes of the weaknesses and diseases peculiar to women.

Dr. Banning, the great American inventor of uterine elevators, is explicit regarding the mechanical displacing of the abdominal and pelvic vicera by dress.

Prof. Phelps, of Andover University, acknowledged to be one of the most learned in the profession, said to his class "that the women of America would ere long be obliged to doff petticoats and put on pants, as the ordinary dress was an injury to the reproductive organs of woman and her whole nerve system."

It requires a high order of moral courage for a scientific man to express himself on the subject, when we calmly look the facts in the face, that so large a number of the women are monomaniacs on dress!

The general question now before the American people is not a monetary one; it is an invalid one. But examine the cut where the location of the organs of generation are plainly seen, and it will not be difficult for even the average man to comprehend what we have said regarding the mechanical injury of ordinary dress. It needs but little causality to readily see how hernia is the result of causes mentioned.

While woman's generative organs are affected as men's cannot be, because they are essentially different, so women who have anteversion, retroversion, inversion and prolappsus of the uterus not only trans-

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mit these tendencies to their daughters, but their sons have weaknesses of the organs of sex. Thus prolapsus of the scrotum may be directly the result of sexual excess, but there must be a weakened condition inherited to produce such a result, as is also the case with other difficulties that do not result from contagion. The law of inheritance is observed as nearly as is possible with the difference of sex.