Howard says: The permanent effects left from early masturbation seem to be much graver in women than in men. As the girl grows, her psychic life becomes more complicated, her natural romantic nature is fed by kiss literature and poetry of the decadents, in which perverted passion is thinly disinfected by erotic mysticism. Under such a stimulating psychic pabulum a dormant sexual volcano may become active. If it is only smoldering, suggestive dressing, the dance and wine will soon bring about the complete explosion. At home in bed, with strange and abnormal psychic pictures, she will seek relief in stupro manu. If this state of affairs is kept up for many years, when she marries her husband is certain to find that he has for a wife a female who has no use for normal sex activity and who has acquired a perverted taste for some form of autoeroticism. It is a curious fact that autoeroticism is frequently practised by married women living with sexually normal husbands. The gynaecologist must consider this fact as the possible cause of many female complaints. A few years ago, the author removed an ovarian tumor and performed a perinæorrhaphy on a woman of thirty-five, mother of a child of ten years of age. While in the hospital the nurse complained that the patient is soiling the wound contrectando muliebria. Three months after the patient left the hospital she called at the author’s office for treatment of ulcerations of the labia and nymphae. The clitoris was found to be one inch long, bluish-red and inflamed, the prepuce swollen and edematous, the nymphae inflamed and swollen. The author told the patient that she could not be cured unless she desisted from autoeroticism which she promised to do. This promise had the value of a confession that she did indulge in autoerotic practices. Yet she had a normal husband who very industriously performed his marital obligations. For before the operation she once asked the author to tell her husband not to have any connections, or at least, not so frequently, with her until after the operation. The female masturbator often becomes excessively prudish, despises and hates the opposite sex, and forms passionate attachments for other women. Masturbation is not seldom the cause of a great number of female complaints. It is often the cause of obstruction and of pains of menstruation, of ovarian neuralgia, of weakness of the legs and of sexual irritation. It causes pruritus vulvae, hypertrophy of the clitoris and labia minora, hyperaemia of the vaginal orifice, fluor albus, and cervical catarrh. Masturbating women often complain of general weakness and of palpitation of the heart. One of the author’s patients, a young masturbator of seventeen, suffered from painful menstruation, attacks of palpitation of the heart, from melancholia and fear of death, and at the same time from suicidal inclinations, which thus revealed the illogical state of her mind.