Case 16. Mrs. V. has suffered with a passion for men since her earliest youth. Of good family, well bred, of pleasant disposition, exceedingly modest, she was, as a little girl, a terror to her family, because she could scarcely be alone with a person of the opposite sex, no matter whether it was with child or man of any age, without exposing herself immediately and demanding satisfaction for her sexual passion, even going so far as to lay hold of him. An attempt was made to cure her by marriage. She loved her husband passionately, but even with him she could not keep from demanding coitus of every one with whom she could be alone, no matter whether it was servant, laborer, or school-boy. Nothing could cure her of this impulse. Even when she became a grandmother, she was still a Messalina. One day she locked a twelve-year-old boy in her room and tried to seduce him. The boy defended himself and escaped. She was severely punished by his brother. All was in vain. She was put in a cloister. There she was an example of morality, and gave not the slightest cause for blame. Immediately after her return the scandal began again. The family banished her, and set aside money to support her. She earned by her own hand-work enough to buy herself lovers. Any one seeing this neatly dressed matron, of good manners and amiable disposition, would never suspect how recklessly passionate she still was at the age of sixty-five. On January 7, 1854, her family, in despair at new scandals, placed her in an asylum. She lived there until May, 1858, when she died of apoplexia cerebri, in her seventy-third year. Her conduct in the asylum was exemplary. Left to herself, and under favorable conditions, her sexual impulses manifested themselves shortly before her death. With the exception of this, during an observation of four years by physicians of the asylum, she never showed a sign of mental abnormality. D. PARÆSTHESIA OF SEXUAL FEELING (PERVERSION OF THE SEXUAL INSTINCT). In this condition there is perverse emotional coloring of the sexual ideas. Ideas physiologically and psychologically accompanied by feelings of disgust, give rise to pleasurable sexual feelings; and the abnormal association finds expression in passionate, uncontrollable emotion. The practical results are perverse acts (perversion of the sexual instinct). This is more easily the case if the pleasurable feelings, increased to passionate intensity, inhibit any opposing ideas with corresponding feelings of disgust; or the influence of such opposing concepts may be impossible on account of the absence or loss of all ideas of morality, æsthetics, and law. This loss, however, is only too frequently found where the spring of ethical ideas and feelings (a normal sexual instinct) has been poisoned from the beginning.