ce it. Thus it is very desirable that when there has been a
concealment of serious disease by a party to a marriage such concealment
should be a ground for divorce. Epilepsy may be taken as typical of the
diseases which should be a bar to procreation, and their concealment
equivalent to an annulment of marriage.[455] In the United States the
Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut laid it down in 1906 that the
Superior Court has the power to pass a decree of divorce when one of the
parties has concealed the existence of epilepsy. This weighty deliverence,
it has been well said,[456] marks a forward step in human progress. There
are many other seriously pathological conditions in which divorce should
be pronounced, or indeed, occur automatically, except when procreation has
been renounced, for in that case the State is no longer concerned in the
relationship, except to punish any fraud committed by concealment.

The demand that a medical certificate of health should be
compulsory on marriage, has been especially made in France. In
1858, Diday, of Lyons, proposed, indeed, that all persons,
without exception, should be compelled to possess a certificate
of health and disease, a kind of sanitary passport. In 1872,
Bertillon (Art. "Demographic," _Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des
Sciences Medicales_) advocated the registration, at marriage, of
the chief anthropological and pathological traits of the
contracting parties (height, weight, color of hair and eyes,
muscular force, size of head, condition of vision, hearing, etc.,
deformities and defects, etc.), not so much, however, for the end
of preventing undesirable marriages, as to facilitate the study
and comparison of human groups at particular periods. Subsequent
demands, of a more limited and partial character, for legal
medical certificates as a condition of marriage, have been made
by Fournier (_Syphilis et Mariage_, 1890), Cazalis (_Le Science
et le Mariage_, 1890), and Jullien (_Blenorrhagie et Mariage_,
1898). In Austria, Haskovec, of Prague ("Contrat Matrimonial et
L'Hygiene Publique," _Comptes-rendus Congres International de
Medecine_, Lisbon, 1906, Section VII, p. 600), argues that, on
marriage, a medical certificate should be presented, showing that
the subject is exempt from tuberculosis, alcoholism, syphilis,
gonorrhoea, severe mental, or nervous, or other degenerative