There are some diseases to which women are especially liable, others
which occur by preference in men. To some extent, indeed, this is
explained by the special exposure of one sex or the other to certain
noxious influences. The neuroses that appear as the sequelae of injuries
are especially common in the male sex, because the occupations of men
expose them more than women to injuries of all kinds. Of such cases, of
course, we do not speak here. But there are some unquestionably
hereditary morbid tendencies which manifest themselves by preference in
one sex or the other, and such sexual predisposition shows itself even
in childhood. I propose to give instances of this; some quoted from
Moebius,[18] some from other authors, and some taken from my own personal
experience.
Chlorosis is a disease of feminine youth, but very often makes its
appearance in childhood, especially towards the end of the second period
of childhood, at this earlier age, also, attacking girls in preference
to boys. Haemophilia, on the other hand, and also certain hereditary
forms of muscular atrophy, occur chiefly in males, and this in early
childhood. Diabetes is principally a disease of adults, but occasionally
it is met with in children also; among adults, there is a considerable
preponderance of males affected with this disease when diabetes occurs
in childhood, the disease also exhibits a preference for the male sex,
although at this time the peculiar sex-incidence is less marked than in
later life. Congenital defects of the heart are commoner in boys, the
proportion obtained from a very large number of cases of this kind being
61.6 boys: 38.4 girls. Chorea (St. Vitus's dance) affects girls more
often than boys, the ratio in this case being 2.5 girls: 1 boy. In the
case of whooping cough, we find that two girls suffer for every one boy.
As regards circumscribed facial atrophy, which usually begins during
childhood, a preponderance of the disease in the female sex is also
noticeable. Hysteria was formerly regarded as a typically feminine
disease, and although this view has now been shown to be erroneous, the
fact remains that girls and women are far more often affected than boys
and men. As regards hysteria in childhood, Bruns[19] states that the
ratio of girls affected is to boys affected as 2:1. It is interesting to
note that in the earlier years of childhood, prior, that is to say, to
the age of nine years or thereabouts, no marked difference exists in the
sex incidence of hysteria, the cases being distributed in the
proportion, 55 per cent. girls, 45 per cent. boys; but after the age of
nine, the proportion of girls affected with hysteria increases, while
that of boys diminishes. Eulenburg,[20] indeed, records 17 cases of
hysteria, affecting children at ages nine to fourteen years; of these
nine were boys, and eight girls. Clopatt, on the other hand, collected
from the literature of the subject 272 cases of hysteria in young
children, 96 being boys, and 176 girls.
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