Perimetritis may result from regurgitation of menstrual fluid through a too patulous Fallopian tube. This is most likely to take place when the egress to the flow has been prevented by a flexion of the uterus sharp enough to practically destroy the calibre of the cervical canal, as when the organ has become retroflexed from subinvolution or some other cause of hypertrophy of the body of the organ. It may, however, occur as a result of the intense engorgement which sometimes attends acute suppression of the catamenia. It may occur from disease in the tube itself, as where a collection of pus or serum has been formed and thrown into the peritoneal cavity either from rupture of the tube or discharge through the natural opening at the fimbriated extremity. Or it may result from hemorrhage following the rupture of a Graäfian follicle, especially where the disease of the tube has resulted in the destruction of its calibre or the power of the fimbriæ to grasp the ovary so as to convey the discharge safely to the uterine cavity. Hemorrhage from any other source, as from the rupture of a blood-vessel or of an extra-uterine gestation-sac, usually results in the development of perimetritis. Coitus is capable of causing perimetritis when the act is awkwardly performed, or where there is a disproportion in the relative sizes of the organs involved, or where the physiological mechanism of copulation is destroyed by displacement of the uterus, free mobility being lost as a result. {229} According to Noeggerrath,[4] a very common cause of perimetritis is what he is pleased to call a latent gonorrhoea in the male. He believes that the disease, once contracted, is probably never entirely eradicated, but that it always exists in a latent form, and that it is capable of producing a specific inflammation of the pelvic peritoneum years after an apparent cure had been effected. It is of course impossible to positively verify this, although he gives some very striking cases in support of his position. That gonorrhoea in the acute form may extend by propagation from a vaginitis through the uterine cavity and Fallopian tubes to the peritoneum, and produce an inflammation of that membrane, is probable. Cases have been met with where a history of specific infection was undoubted, in which an attack of perimetritis followed soon after the initial symptoms and physical signs of gonorrhoea were manifested. But it is quite another thing to believe that the specific poison may remain latent and harmless in the genital system of the male to be transferred years afterward to that of the female. [Footnote 4: "Latent Gonorrhoea, etc.," _Trans. Amer. Gynæc. Soc._, vol. i. p. 268.] Tuberculous or carcinomatous disease of the pelvic organs is nearly always complicated by a certain degree of perimetritis.