It happened that two of the severest cases I have seen occurred, one in
a Jewish woman and the other in a young Irish woman, with such an
identity of symptoms and social domestic background that either case
might have been interchanged for the other without any appreciable
difference. The factors in the cases might simply be summarized as
childlessness, anxiety, neglect, and loneliness, and in each case the
main symptoms were anxiety, attacks of cardiac symptoms, fatigue, and
sleeplessness.
The young Jewish woman, thirty years of age, had been married since the
age of twenty. Before marriage she worked in the needle trades, was well
and strong and had no knowledge of any particular nervous or mental
disease in her family. She married a man of twenty-four, who had also
been in the tailoring business and had branched out in a small way in
business. This business required him to go to work at about seven-thirty
in the morning and he finished at nine-thirty in the evening. In the
earlier years of their marriage he came home rather promptly at the end
of his long day and the pair were quite happy.
At about the third year after marriage the woman became quite alarmed at
her continued sterility. She commenced to consult physicians and in the
course of the next three years underwent three operations with no
result. She began to brood over this, especially since about this time
her husband began to show a decided lack of interest in the home. He
would come home at twelve and later, and she found that he was playing
cards,--in fact had become a confirmed gambler. When she first
discovered this, she became greatly worried; made a trip to New York
where his people lived and induced them to bring pressure to bear on him
for reform. This they did, with the result that for about six months he
remained away from cards and gave more attention to his wife.
The reform lasted only for a short period and then the husband plunged
deeper into gaming than ever, and there were periods of three and four
days at a stretch when he would not return home at all. At such times
the lonely wife, who still loved her husband, fell into a perturbed and
agitated frame of mind, the worse because she confided her difficulties
to no one. When he would return, shamefaced and repentant, she would
reproach him bitterly and this would bring about renewed attention,
gifts, etc., for a week or so,--and then backsliding. Finally even the
brief spasmodic reforms grew less common, her reproaches were answered
hotly or listened to with indifference, and she became "practically a
widow" except for the occasions when the sexual feeling mastered them
both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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