100 years ago in Spokane: A doctor’s talk on ‘the growing girl’ included a theory that too much schoolwork left them ‘broken in health’

Dr. Frances Houston delivered a talk on “The Care of the Growing Girl” at the Red Cross Health Center at the Crescent auditorium.

She “stressed the fact that the hygiene of puberty is the greatest single factor to be dealt with in the care of the growing girl.” It is the mother, she said, who “exerts the most profound and permanent influence upon the character and temperament of the growing girl.”

The doctor also decried the tendency of schools and parents to “crowd too much” into the curriculum of a child.

“Laudable as such an ambition may be, it may be pushed to such a limit as to be unnatural and unwise,” Houston said. “Educational driving has left in its train thousands of young girls who are broken in health and left neurasthenic and anemic. … Many an invalid woman is the product of the delicate, overworked school girl.”

From the accident beat: An aged woman, disabled by rheumatism, died at her home when her clothing caught fire after she opened up her coal stove.

Her body was found in a rocking chair in front of the stove by a friend who came to pay her a visit later in the day.

Police said the stove was still warm when they arrived.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1429: Joan of Arc entered the besieged city of Orleans to lead a French victory over the English.

1967: Aretha Franklin’s cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” was released as a single by Atlantic Records.

1997: A worldwide treaty to ban chemical weapons went into effect.