However it was not only the sick that were avoided, but all possible causes as well that might lead to the disease. It was not only the effort required and the pain, but most likely the possibility also of injury resulting, that made the weakly Asiatic forgo the _Jus primae noctis_ (Right of the first night), and declare unclean the supposed[211] injurious effects of the vaginal blood that flowed on the rupture of the hymen, as well as the act of defloration itself. Pollution was guarded against in this case, as it was by the regulation banishing women during the time of menstruation from the neighbourhood of men, a regulation that had the binding force of law amongst almost all the Nations of Antiquity. The same held good for the time of purification of women who had been lying-in,[212] a condition which was supposed in some unexplained way to be able to exert a possibly injurious influence on the genital organs of the husband. Depilation. § 35. In spite of all this it might yet happen that contact with a sick person could not be avoided, and all possible causes of the diseases in question escaped. Attention therefore was naturally directed to the effort to make the admission of the contagion and of matters having deleterious effects as difficult as might be. There were two means for attaining this end held to be especially effective,—depilation and circumcision. The hair as is well known is particularly apt to attract and retain all kinds of moisture; and it will of course do this in the case of the genital secretions, whether healthy or morbid, if they come in contact with it. These secretions will the more readily exert an injurious effect, as each hair is accompanied by at least two cutaneous glands, possessing an excretory duct or pore, and in those parts of the body where a thicker and stronger growth of hair is found, develop a considerably increased degree of activity,—an increased activity which they exhibit in any case in hot countries. “Hence too the Priests in Egypt shave the body carefully; for there is something collects under the hair, that must be removed,” _Philo_ says in a passage cited above, and a fragment of _Theopompus_ preserved by _Athenaeus_[213] also tells us, that this habit existed also among the Greeks, as well as among different peoples of Italy.