Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in WomenEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
To Calmann appear to be due the first carefully made observations
showing the minor sensibility of the genital tract in women.
(Adolf Calmann, "Sensibilitütsprufungen am weiblicken Genitale
nach forensichen Gesichtspunkten," _Archiv für Gynäkologie_,
1898, p. 454.) He investigated the vagina, urethra, and anus in
eighteen women and found a great lack of sensibility, least
marked in anus, and most marked in vagina. [This distribution of
the insensitiveness alone indicates that it is due, as I have
suggested, to natural selection.] Sometimes a finger in the
vagina could not be felt at all. One woman, when a catheter was
introduced into the anus, said it might be the vagina or urethra,
but was certainly not the anus. (Calmann remarks that he was
careful to put his questions in an intelligible form.) The women
were only conscious of the urine being drawn off when they heard
the familiar sound of the stream or when the bladder was very
full; if the sound of the stream was deadened by a towel they
were quite unconscious that the bladder had been emptied. [In
confirmation of this statement I have noticed that in a lady
whose distended bladder it was necessary to empty by the catheter
shortly before the birth of her first child--but who had, indeed,
been partly under the influence of chloroform--there was no
consciousness of the artificial relief; she merely remarked that
she thought she could now relieve herself.] There was some sense
of temperature, but sense of locality, tactile sense, and
judgment of size were often widely erroneous. It is significant
that virgins were just as insensitive as married women or those
who had had children. Calmann's experiments appear to be
confirmed by the experiments of Marco Treves, of Turin, on the
thermoesthesiometry of mucous membranes, as reported to the Turin
International Congress of Physiology (and briefly noted in
_Nature_, November 21, 1901). Treves found that the sensitivity
of mucous membranes is always less than that of the skin. The
mucosa of the urethra and of the cervix uteri was quite incapable
of heat and cold sensations, and even the cautery excited only
slight, and that painful, sensation.
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