ell known that uterine fibroids bear a definite relation to
organic sexual activity, and that sexual abstinence, more
especially the long-continued deprivation of pregnancy, is a very
important cause of the disease. This is well shown by an analysis
by A.E. Giles (_Lancet_, March 2, 1907) of one hundred and fifty
cases. As many as fifty-six of these cases, more than a third,
were unmarried women, though nearly all were over thirty years of
age. Of the ninety-four married women, thirty-four had never been
pregnant; of those who had been pregnant, thirty-six had not been
so for at least ten years. Thus eighty-four per cent, had either
not been pregnant at all, or had had no pregnancy for at least
ten years. It is, therefore, evident that deprivation of sexual
function, whether or not involving abstinence from sexual
intercourse, is an important cause of uterine fibroid tumors.
Balls-Headley, of Victoria (_Evolution of the Diseases of Women_,
1894, and "Etiology of Diseases of Female Genital Organs,"
Allbutt and Playfair, _System of Gynaecology_,) believes that
unsatisfied sexual desire is a factor in very many disorders of
the sexual organs in women. "My views," he writes in a private
letter, "are founded on a really special gynaecological practice
of twenty years, during which I have myself taken about seven
thousand most careful records. The normal woman is sexually
well-formed and her sexual feelings require satisfaction in the
direction of the production of the next generation, but under the
restrictive and now especially abnormal conditions of
civilization some women undergo hereditary atrophy, and the
uterus and sexual feelings are feeble; in others of good average
local development the feeling is in restraint; in others the
feelings, as well as the organs, are strong, and if normal use be
withheld evils ensue. Bearing in mind these varieties of
congenital development in relation to the respective condition of
virginity, or sterile or parous married life, the mode of
occurrence and of progress of disease grows on the physician's
mind, and there is no more occasion for bewilderment than to the
mathematician studying conic sections, when his knowledge has
grown from the basis of the science. The problem is suggested:
Has a crowd of unassociated diseases fallen as through a siev