Note 32 — Chapter XIX · CLAIMS OF WOMEN.

Here is what Dr. Russell Reynolds, F.R.S., said in 1881 in an address to the Medical Society of University College:—“There is meddling and muddling of a most disreputable sort, and the patients” (he is speaking of women) “grow sick of it, and give it all up and get well; or they go from bad to worse.”... “Physicians have coined names for trifling maladies, if they have not invented them, and have set fashions of disease. They have treated or maltreated their patients by endless examinations, applications, and the like, and this sometimes for months, sometimes for years, and then, when by some accident the patient has been removed from their care, she has become quite well and there has been no more need for caustic,” &c., &c.

And here is what Dr. Clifford Allbut said in the Gulstonian Lecture for 1884 at the Royal College of Physicians. After admitting that women feel more pain than men, he mentioned the “morbid chains,” the “mental abasement,” into which fall “the flock of women who lie under the wand of the Gynæcologist” (specialist of women’s diseases); “the women who are caged up in London back drawing-rooms, and visited almost daily; their brave and active spirits broken under a false (!!) belief in the presence of a secret and over-mastering local malady; and the best years of their lives honoured only by a distressful victory over pain.” (Italics mine.)—Medical Press, March 19th, 1884.