Men often complain of the apathy in their wives, to which I have just referred, and improperly attribute it to want of affection. It is in no small number of cases the result of physical suffering, often extreme, and sometimes endured without a word of complaint even to the end. The spirit prompting this great patience is one of the truest and most self-sacrificing heroism. I do not, however, hesitate to pronounce it wrong, and to declare the silence of one woman, under such circumstances, is a positive harm to her whole sex. It is often through a mistaken sense of duty—an opinion encouraged of course by the husband, and sometimes even by the medical attendant, to whom the simplest principles of his science should teach a more reasonable view. Thus one eminent writer remarks: “In some instances, indeed, feeling has been sacrificed to duty, and the wife has endured, with all the self-martyrdom of womanhood, what was almost worse than death.”[43] Even in these later days, since it has been discovered that there almost always exists a physical cause for all the many peculiar woes that women suffer, there are still many husbands, there are still physicians, who see in a wife’s languor, a wife’s disability, a wife’s complaints, but the vain imaginings of a distempered mind, or the restless chafing of a soured and impatient disposition, and think that by according even but trifling sympathy, they are encouraging a groundless whim, or exciting to ennui, hysteria, or rebellion. Hard, indeed, the lives of these poor sufferers,—who, if half confessing their secret distress, are thought to exaggerate a trifling ailment, or to fabricate one for the occasion. And yet it is upon just these troubles, actual and very real, upon just these sufferings, harassing and often very intense, that half the woes of a woman’s life are based. They cause her to reject her husband, to destroy her unborn offspring; they make her moody and despondent, and to look forward without hope; they often send her to the insane asylum, and not unfrequently cause her to take her life; just these simple troubles, so easily detected when searched for, and many of them so easily cured.