among two thousand girls that 75 per cent.
had menstrual troubles, 90 per cent. had leucorrhoea and ovarian
neuralgia, and 60 per cent. had to give up work for two days
during each month. These results seem more than usually
unfavorable, but are significant, as they cover a large number of
cases. The conditions in the Pacific States are not much better.
Dr. Mary Ritter (in a paper read before the California State
Medical Society in 1903) stated that of 660 Freshmen girls at the
University of California, 67 per cent. were subject to menstrual
disorders, 27 per cent. to headaches, 30 per cent. to backaches,
29 per cent. were habitually constipated, 16 per cent. had
abnormal heart sounds; only 23 per cent. were free from
functional disturbances. Dr. Helen MacMurchey, in an interesting
paper on "Physiological Phenomena Preceding or Accompanying
Menstruation" (_Lancet_, Oct. 5, 1901), by inquiries among one
hundred medical women, nurses, and women teachers in Toronto
concerning the presence or absence of twenty-one different
abnormal menstrual phenomena, found that between 50 and 60 per
cent. admitted that they were liable at this time to disturbed
sleep, to headache, to mental depression, to digestive
disturbance, or to disturbance of the special senses, while about
25 to 50 per cent. were liable to neuralgia, to vertigo, to
excessive nervous energy, to defective nervous and muscular
power, to cutaneous hyperaesthesia, to vasomotor disturbances, to
constipation, to diarrhoea, to increased urination, to cutaneous
eruption, to increased liability to take cold, or to irritating
watery discharges before or after the menstrual discharge. This
inquiry is of much interest, because it clearly brings out the
marked prevalence at menstruation of conditions which, though not
necessarily of any gravity, yet definitely indicate decreased
power of resistance to morbid influences and diminished
efficiency for work.

How serious an impediment menstrual troubles are to a woman is
indicated by the fact that the women who achieve success and fame
seem seldom to be greatly affected by them. To that we may, in
part, attribute the frequency with which leaders of the women's
movement have treated menstruation as a thing of no importance in
a woman's life. Adele Gerhard, and Helene Simon, also, in the