From the time of _Galen_ onwards all medical writers have agreed that the heart is unfavorably influenced by pregnancy and its consequences—but from this incontestable proposition to deduce the general conclusion that young women affected with heart disease must be forbidden to marry is in my opinion too great a jump, and altogether too sweeping a statement. The apophthegm of _Peters_, an author to whom we are certainly indebted for some of our knowledge of the _accidents gravido-cardiaques_, that in the case of women suffering from morbus cordis the rule must be enforced, _fille pas de mariage_, _femme pas de grossesse_, _mère pas d’allaitement_, has a fine air of apodictic brevity, but is entirely devoid of justification. No such rigid prohibition is advanced by recent writers on heart disease, such as _Huchard_, _von Leyden_, and _Rosenbach_; not, at least, without qualifications. The question as to the permissibility of marriage to girls and women affected with heart disease cannot, in fact, be answered by any general proposition; and each case demands separate inquiry and a careful balancing of individual considerations. I have known cases in which the marriage of young girls suffering from morbus cordis was equivalent to a sentence of death, the execution of which was delayed for a few months only. On the other hand, I have known many women belonging to the upper classes and suffering from cardiac defects to pass through numerous pregnancies and to give birth to a number of children with no more than trifling disturbances of compensation. I am acquainted with a lady who when a young girl was urgently advised against marriage, on account of extensive aortic valvular incompetency, by two celebrated physicians. The advice was disregarded, and this lady is now the mother of four children, the eldest of whom is twenty-two years of age, and her general condition is in no way worse than it was before her marriage. The dangers of marriage in women suffering from morbus cordis are in my opinion generally overrated. The degree to which a woman affected with heart disease will be injured by married life, will depend on the nature of the cardiac affection, on the time it has already existed, on the adequacy of compensation or the intensity of existing disturbances of compensation, on the general state of nutrition of the patient, on the more or less favorable social position, and on the manner in which sexual intercourse is regulated.