Parturition, to an even greater extent than pregnancy, may induce serious injuries to the female organism. Thus, during parturition, lacerations of the vagina are frequent, with consequent scar-formation and stenosis; lacerations of the perineum are also common, causing great inconvenience, and when complete, leading to incontinence of fæces with all its unpleasant consequences. Great is the danger arising from septic puerperal inflammations, such as pelvic peritonitis (perimetritis); serious are the results of puerperal vesico-vaginal and recto-vaginal fistulæ. A large part in the local pathology of the female genital organs is played by the various displacements of the uterus, either arising in consequence of inflammatory processes in their ligaments, or dependent upon relaxation of these ligaments from subinvolution of the internal generative organs, either following delivery at full term or following abortion. The injury which women alike of the well-to-do and of the laboring classes suffer in consequence of numerous and frequently repeated pregnancies, is minutely described by _Hegar_. “We can,” he writes, “calculate the danger to life to which such an unfortunate woman is exposed by the act of reproduction. If we assume the ordinary mortality of women in childbed to be 6 per mille, then, in a woman who within 15 years has been delivered 16 times (whether prematurely or at full term), the danger will be 16 times as great as that of a single delivery, and the mortality will be 6 × 16 = 96 per mille; that is to say, of 1,000 women who have all been pregnant that number of times, 96 will die—nearly 1 in 10. Moreover, in this calculation the increased danger consequent upon the unusually rapid sequence of the deliveries has not been taken into consideration. And, again, only the immediate results of the deliveries have been taken into the account. Not infrequently women succumb at a later date to illnesses acquired in childbed; whilst others, in consequence of repeated pregnancies, have their powers of resistance so greatly diminished, that they are unequal to the contest with incidental diseases. In any case, a woman who has experienced numerous and rapidly successive pregnancies, has sustained damages which will endure for the rest of her life. Her tissues have lost their elasticity, the abdominal walls are flaccid, the abdomen is prominent, the abdominal viscera are displaced, the vessels dilated, the reproductive organs in a state of subinvolution, and are the seat of structural alterations. The greatest dangers arise in cases in which the pregnancies are consequences that have to be paid for illicit love, since in such cases syphilitic and gonorrhœal infection are exceptionally common. These complications, indeed, are not excluded in the case of married women, since marital infidelities occur, and, again, a premarital but not completely cured venereal illness may bear fruit in