chism--Sexual Impotence and Marriage--Effect Upon
the Wife--Frigidity--Marital Relations and Frigid Woman--Excessive
Libido and Marriage--Excessive Demands Upon Wife--Satyriasis--
The Excessively Libidinous Wife--Nymphomania--Treatment--Harelip--
Myopia--Astigmatism--Premature Baldness--Criminality--Crime as
Result of Environment--Legal and Moral Crime--Ancestral Criminality
and Marriage--Rules of Heredity--Pauperism--Difference Between
Pauperism and Poverty.

In former years, nobody thought of asking a physician for permission
to get married. He was not consulted in the matter at all. The parents
would investigate the young man's social standing, his ability to make
a living, his habits perhaps, whether he was a drinking man or not,
but to ask the physician's expert advice--why, as said, nobody thought
of it. And how much sorrow and unhappiness, how many tragedies the
doctor could have averted, if he had been asked in time! Fortunately,
in the last few years, a great change has taken place in this respect.
It is now a very common occurrence for the intelligent layman and
laywoman, imbued with a sense of responsibility for the welfare of
their presumptive future offspring and actuated, perhaps, also by some
fear of infection, to consult a physician as to the advisability of
the marriage, leaving it to him to make the decision and they abiding
by that decision.

As a matter of fact, as often is the case, the pendulum now is in
danger of swinging to the other extreme; for, a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing, and the tendency of the layman is to exaggerate
matters and to take things in an absolute instead of in a relative
manner. As a result, many laymen and laywomen nowadays insist upon a
thorough examination of their own person and the person of their
future partner, when there is nothing the matter with either. Still,
this is a minor evil, and it is better to be too careful than not
careful enough.

I am frequently consulted as to the advisability or nonadvisability of
a certain marriage taking place. I, therefore, thought it desirable to
discuss in a separate chapter the various factors, physical and
mental, personal and ancestral, likely to exert an influence upon the
marital partner and on the expected offspring, and to state as briefly
as possible and so far as our present state of knowledge permits which
factors may be considered eugenic, or favorable to the offspring, and
dysgenic, or unfa