Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The lung capacity of women is less, and they consume less oxygen and
produce less carbonic acid than men of equal weight, although the
number of respirations is slightly higher than in man. On this account
women suffer deprivation of air more easily than men. They are not so
easily suffocated, and are reported to endure charcoal fumes better,
and live in high altitudes where men cannot endure the deprivation of
oxygen.[68] The number of deaths from chloroform is reckoned as from
two to four times as great in males as in females, and this although
chloroform is used in childbirth. Children also bear chloroform
well.[69] Women, like children, require more sleep normally than men,
but "Macfarlane states that they can better bear the loss of sleep,
and most physicians will agree with him.... One of the greatest
difficulties we have to contend with in nervous men is sleeplessness,
a result, no doubt, of excessive katabolism."[70] Loss of sleep is
a strain which, like gestation, women are able to meet because of
their anabolic surplus. The fact that women undertake changes more
reluctantly than men, but adjust themselves to changed fortunes more
readily, is due to the same metabolic difference. Man has, in short,
become somatically a more specialized animal than woman, and feels
more keenly any disturbance of normal conditions, while he has not
the same physiological surplus as woman with which to meet the
disturbance.
Lower forms of life have the remarkable quality of restoring a lost
organ, and of living as separate individuals if divided. This power
gradually diminishes as we ascend the scale of life, and is lost by
the higher forms. It is a remarkable fact, however, that the lower
human races, the lower classes of society, women and children, show
something of the same quality in their superior tolerance of surgical
disease. The indifference of savage races to wounds and loss of
blood has everywhere been remarked by ethnologists. Dr. Bartels has
formulated the law of resistance to surgical and traumatic treatment
in the following sentence: "The higher the race, the less the
tolerance, and the lower the culture-condition in a given race, the
greater the tolerance."[71] The greater disvulnerability of women is
generally recognized by surgeons. The following figures from Lawrie,
Malgaigne, and Fenwick are representative:[72]
LAWRIE (GLASGOW)
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