ing the female much more excitable and more easily affected by external agencies; especially those which suddenly produce strong mental or moral emotions. Hence the importance of preventing, as far as possible, pregnant women from being exposed to causes likely to distress, or otherwise strongly impress their minds."[1] These objective mental conditions described by the author must not be regarded as exceptional; on the contrary, they are classed among the usual symptoms of that condition. Still more marked mental disturbances may occur and are not rare, as in the following quotation from Dr. Storer: "Strange appetites, or longings, as they are called, and antipathies, are well known as frequent attendants on pregnancy in many persons."[2] And further: "The evidence that I have now presented proves that the state of pregnancy is one subject to grave mental and physical derangements, giving rise to serious anxieties, and requiring judicious treatment."[3] These mental effects are of minor importance in the relation we are studying, when we consider the fact that absolute insanity may be an accompaniment of either gestation, or follow parturition. Dr. Maudsley refers to this as explaining the excess of female insane over that of the other sex.[4]
Dr. Forbes Winslow draws a startling picture of this catastrophe: "When, after numerous struggles to repress them, the propensities excited into such fearful and almost supernatural activity by ovarian irritation burst forth beyond all control, and the pet of the family is seen to be the opposite, morally, in every respect to what she had been—irreligious, selfish, slanderous, false, malicious, devoid of affection, thievish in a thousand petty ways, bold, maybe erotic, self-willed and quarrelsome; and if the case be not rightly understood, great and often irreparable mischief is done to correct what seems to be vice, but is really insanity."[5]
We have but one other sexual accident to consider which may act as a bar to woman's progress in the professions. These accidents are incident to the climacteric period of life. This period includes the years between forty and fifty, and, judging from men, a professional woman ought then to be most actively engaged in her occupation. It is during the functional changes then taking place that women are exposed again to the dangers which attend the advent of puberty. It is the second and last crisis in the functional life of woman. We will let the mere bodily diseases of this period pass unnoticed, and refer to those of cerebral origin, as mind forms the working organ of the professional woman. Dr. Bedford regards the varieties of nervous irritation peculiar to this period as "beyond calculation."[6] In fact, it is upon
