The wedding journey likewise deserves consideration from the hygienic standpoint. Much is to be said in favor of such a journey, inasmuch as it endows the necessarily somewhat brutal first act of intercourse with an aspect of romance. The removal to a foreign country, to a strange environment, will spare the chaste maiden much shame and vexation. On the journey, moreover, the young couple are much in each other’s company, and the process of mutual adaptation is agreeably favored. And yet this modern custom of making a wedding journey entails certain serious disadvantages. The young woman leaves her home and her nearest relatives, and is in a moment involved in the excitement of travel, an excitement liable to increase to the degree of morbid anxiety. The fatigues of railway-travel, of wandering about strange towns, of visits to museums and picture-galleries, are apt to cause general loss of nervous tone, and also local hyperæmia of the genital organs. In addition, false modesty and the prescribed arrangements for the journey may lead the onset of menstruation to be ignored and the customary rest at this period to be dispensed with. Still more, the possibility of the occurrence of conception and of the commencement of pregnancy is usually left altogether out of the account. Many an attack of menorrhagia, of perimetritis, and of endometritis, many a miscarriage, and many instances of protracted sterility, are dependent upon the hygienic mistakes of the wedding journey, and less, indeed, upon the abuses arising out of the intoxication of passion, than upon the fatigues of excessive travel both by day and by night. The bride who on her wedding-day was young, healthy, and full of vitality, not infrequently returns from the wedding journey a sickly and debilitated woman. With regard to wedding journeys in relation to the causation of chronic metritis, _Scanzoni_ has expressed an authoritative opinion. “After many weeks of unsatisfied sexual desire, the young married pair, now freed from all restraint, give themselves up to the joys of love; the intense sexual excitement causes great stimulation and hyperæmia of the female sexual organs; in addition, the noxious influences of travel make themselves felt, and also hygienic indiscretions are perpetrated, dependent upon the young wife’s modesty; it is, therefore, by no means to be wondered at that, having left home a perfectly healthy woman, she returns from her wedding journey with the germs of an illness from which she never fully recovers, and which is the source of unending suffering, and more particularly of a sterile marriage.” Sexual hygiene demands a certain moderation in the enjoyment of physical love, and also a certain constancy, such as may be expected in a happy marriage.