At this period of life, and especially in women who lead luxurious “society” lives, the thoughts tend strongly in the sexual direction; to avoid this, and to prevent the ever more and more frequent breaches of marital fidelity, the best means are the practice of vigorous bodily exercises, and active employment, either in household affairs or in intellectual occupations. Cold sponging of the body or cold full baths will also be found an excellent measure for the prevention of sexual excess. In such cases also the diet should be limited, strong and stimulating food should be avoided, but little butcher’s meat should be taken, whilst green vegetables and raw and cooked fruits should be liberally consumed; at the same time, all alcoholic beverages must be rigidly prohibited. Moreover, care must be taken that during the night there should be no undue physical stimulation in consequence of excessively warm and soft bedding; hair mattresses are to be preferred to feather beds, with light down quilts for a covering. Finally, no stimulation of an erotic character should be offered to the imagination, and for this reason equivocal literature and lascivious dramatic representations must be avoided. By a sufficiency of occupation, regular, interesting, and demanding a considerable expenditure of physical energy, a woman may be enabled to a great extent to escape the inconvenience and distress attendant on entire or partial lack of gratification of the sexual impulse. It cannot be disputed that a certain and moderate amount of sexual gratification is requisite for the perfect maintenance of physical health in woman, and that the absence of this gratification, or the gratification of the impulse in an abnormal or incomplete manner, entails disturbance of alike the mental and the physical equilibrium; but, on the other hand, the deleterious consequences of sexual abstinence have been greatly exaggerated by many writers—both by physicians and social economists. Owing to the fact that to the cultivated woman sexual gratification is possible only in the married state, whilst social conditions render marriage impossible to many women greatly in need of such gratification; in consequence, also, of the modern and ever more widely diffused practice by husbands of coitus interruptus altogether regardless of the woman’s need for complete sexual gratification—there arise in women numerous local disorders and nervous disturbances, hysteria and even insanity being results by no means infrequent. The significance of ungratified sexual impulse in the pathogenesis of nervous disorders has been established by _von Krafft-Ebing_, who points out that in unmarried women insanity most frequently occurs between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five years, during the decade, that is to say, in which youthful bloom and the hopes of marriage simultaneously disappear; whereas in the male sex the greatest incidence of insanity is between the ages of thirty-five and