Fainting

FAINTING. 
Is it Only a Fashionable Feminine Accomplishment? 

In the novels of a generation or so back, fainting seems to be generally regarded as an accomplishment of a fashionable woman. Whenever there was an awkward situation to be covered the woman discreetly and decorously fainted. It is also insinuated that place as well as time had to be considered in the fitting exercise of this accomplishment. There must be a convenient couch to lie on and still more there must be a pair of manly arms to support the limp burden as it swayed and slipped to the ground. Women did not as a rule exhibit this accomplishment for the benefit of their own sex, but only when some observant male was at hand to see and succor. 

The heroines of the modern novelist are not given to fainting. The "accomplishment" seems to have gone out with the working of samplers. Weakness was once a woman's weapon. Now she despises weakness and all its symptoms. It may be taken for granted therefore that now-a-days if a woman faints it is because of genuine weakness that she cannot conceal. Instead of wanting male observation she avoids it and despises herself for her own frailty. 
WHY WOMEN FAINT. 
In general women who faint are more liable to do so at some special periods than at others, and the liability to faint is generally increased with the recurrences of the periodic womanly function. From this fact alone it might be fairly argued that there is a close relation between local womanly weakness and the physical weakness which causes women to faint. Womanly ailments surely undermine the general health. Irregularity, suppression, profusion, unhealthy drains, inflammation, ulceration, and female weakness, are the diseases which drain the vitality and weaken the general health of women and render them liable among other things to "fainting spells." Cure the local womanly diseases and there is at once a gain in the general health. 
"It gives me great pleasure," writes Miss Ella Sapp, of Jamestown, Guilford Co., N.C., "to thank Dr. Pierce for the great good received from the use of his 'Favorite Prescription' and 'Golden Medical Discovery.' I had suffered for three years or more at monthly suffered for three years or more at monthly periods. It seemed as though I would die with pains in my back and stomach. I could not rise to my feet at all without fainting; had given up all hope of ever being cured, when one of my friends insisted upon my trying Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription. With but little faith I tried it, and before I had taken half a bottle I felt better, had better appetite and slept better. Now I have taken two bottles of 'Favorite Prescription' and one of 'Golden Medical Discovery,' and am happy to say I am entirely cured, and all done in two months' time when all other medicines had failed to do any good at all."