If such a person is by nature emotional she is sure to become more so, for even the firmest women lose self-control at last under incessant feebleness.

Nor is this less true of men; and I have many a time seen soldiers who had ridden boldly with Sheridan or fought gallantly with Grant become, under the influence of painful nerve-wounds, as irritable and hysterically emotional as the veriest girl.

If no rescue comes, the fate of women thus disordered is at last the bed.

They acquire tender spines, and furnish the most lamentable examples of all the strange phenomena of hysteria.
The moral degradation which such cases undergo is pitiable.

I have heard a good deal of the disciplinary usefulness of sickness, and this may well apply to brief and grave, and what I might call wholesome, maladies.