nevertheless have assured to them by custom from three to five days every month so long as the monthly law rules them.
With the present increased attention to the study of preventive medicine, students of gynecology have come to believe that the diseases of women are in good part due to their "ignorance of functional hygiene." In 1901 Doctor Engelmann gave as his president's address at the annual meeting of the American Gynecological Society a paper, "The American Girl of To-day" which entirely covers this subject from the physician's point of view. In brief his opinion as there expressed is: "Adolescence is the most important period of a woman's life, the period during which the foundations of future health are laid. It is in this period of school, the beginning of social life, the period of learning in trades that the nervous energies of the female are most fully engaged and her activity is concentrated on the brain to the detriment of other functions, above all the developing sexual function, the central and most important and at that time the most easily disturbed."
Dr. Wylie has expressed his opinion that "The American horse receives on the average better treatment than the young women of America from the time of early girlhood until the age of development is passed."
President Clark and Professor Tyler have studied systems of education with especial reference to the physical development of children. In his book 'Adolescence,' President Hall devotes a long chapter to the subject of 'Periodicity.' He is himself convinced that the health of a woman for her whole life is determined in her days of adolescence, and he cites so many witnesses, ancient and modern, learned and savage, that the most unbelieving reader can but be convinced while she reads.
Professor Tyler, as a student of biology and education, has considered what bearing the laws of growth have upon the proper arrangement of courses of study. In his lectures on 'The Physical Basis of Education' given last winter in Boston before the Twentieth Century Club he said, concerning the development of girls during their school years, "At the critical period of puberty almost every organ in the girl's body is affected. [The girl's] pubertal period is much more likely to be stormy than the boy's and her rate of morbidity is considerably higher. Her future health and happiness, if not her life, depend upon the successful completion of the metamorphosis."
A valuable addition to our knowledge of schoolgirls has been made by Dr. Helen Kennedy. She collected statistics of the habits and the health of girls from a large city high school; her article includes her questions and the answers of the students, so that we may draw our own conclusions. We note that while nearly all the girls report themselves as growing no worse during their high-school course, 97 out of the 125 say that they suffer to a greater or less degree. All Dr. Ken
