"If the good harmony of families and their reciprocal relations are seriously menaced by the invasion of these detestable practices, the health of women, as we have already intimated, is fearfully injured. A great number of neuralgias appear to us to have no other cause. Many women that we have interrogated on this matter have fortified this opinion. But that which to us has passed to the condition of incontestable proof, is the prevalence of uterine troubles, of enervation among the married, hysterical symptoms which are met with in the conjugal relation as often as among young virgins, arising from the vicious habits of the husbands in their conjugal intercourse.... Still more, there is a graver affection, which is daily increasing, and which, if nothing arrests its invasion, will soon have attained the proportions of a scourge; we speak of the degeneration of the womb. We do not hesitate to place in the foremost rank, among the causes of this redoubtable disease, the refinements of civilization, and especially the artifices introduced in our day in the generic act. When there is no procreation, although the procreative faculties are excited, we see these pseudo-morphoses arise. Thus it is noticed that polypi and schirrus [cancer] of the womb are common among prostitutes. And it is easy to account for the manner of action of this pathogenetic cause, if we consider how probable it is that the ejaculation and contact of the sperm with the uterine neck, constitutes, for the woman, the crisis of the genital function, by appeasing the venereal orgasm and calming the voluptuous emotions under the action of which the entire economy is convulsed." "We may, we trust, be pardoned for remarking upon the artifices imagined to prevent fecundation that there is in them an immense danger, of incalculable limits. We do not fear to be contradicted or taxed with exaggeration in elevating them into the proportions of a true calamity." The following is from an eminent physician[25] who for many years devoted his whole attention to the diseases of women and lectured upon the subject in a prominent medical college:--