ly impelled toward
the male sex to know that she is not being "tempted by the devil" but
merely driven by the insistent chemicals within her body. She is
likely to rationalize and tell herself that it is too bad for a
worth-while person like herself to leave no progeny behind her; or she
may say, as one of my patients did when contemplating running away
with another woman's husband,--that she could make that man so much
happier than his wife did, and that she really owed it to him as well
as to herself. When a woman knows what is the matter with her, it
makes it easier to bide her time and wait for the demands of Nature to
subside. Chemicals may not be so romantic as love, but neither are
they so melodramatic!

OTHER TROUBLES

="Speaking of Operations."= Physicians are often called upon to
diagnose some such vague symptom as pain in the abdomen, back and
head; ache in the legs; constipation, or loss of appetite. Since the
patient is very insistent that something shall be done, the physician
may be driven to operate, even when he has an uneasy feeling that the
trouble is "merely nervous." Sixty per cent. of the operations on
women are necessitated by the results of gonorrheal infection. Next in
frequency up to recent date, have been operations for nervous symptoms
which could in no way be reached by the knife. Only too often a
nerve-specialist hears the tale of an operation which was supposed to
cure a certain pain but which left it worse rather than better. It is
a pleasure to see some of these pains disappear under a little
re-education, but one cannot help wishing that the re-education had
come before the knife instead of after it.

A skilled surgeon can cut almost anything out of a person's body, but
he cannot cut out an instinct. It sometimes takes great skill to
determine whether the trouble is an organic affection or a functional
disturbance caused by the misdirected instinct of reproduction. Often,
however, the clinical pictures are so different as to leave no room
for doubt, provided the diagnostician has his eyes open and is not
over-persuaded by the importunity of the poor neurotic, who insists
that the surgeon shall remove her appendix, her gall-bladder, her
genital organs, and her tonsils, and who finally comes back that he
may have a whack at the operation scar.

=The Bearing of Children.= A number of years ago I became acquainted
with a charming young married woman who had all her life recoiled with