INTRODUCTORY.
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cost of subsistence, ancl properly enters into the sum total of the possible burden involved by the loss to effective industry of the working female. There is no lack of evidence going to establish the special tendency of uterine and functional disturbance to produce insanity, and of the predisposition of certain lines of female work to cause these disturbances. It is found that “ laborers ” hold the second place in numbers among the patients of the Massachusetts insane asylums, and that a large preponderance of these are females. Of these, it is believed that fully five per cent have found the direct or aggravating cause of their insanity * in
* “ It is certain, however, that disease of them (the generative organs) may act as a powerful co-operating cause in the production of insanity, without giving rise, so far as we know, to a special group of symptoms. Thus, for example, melancholia distinguishable by no feature from melancholia otherwise caused may he the effect of disease of the uterus. Schröder van der Kolk mentions the case of a woman profoundly melancholic who suffered from prolapsus uteri, and in whom the melancholia disappeared when the uterus was returned to the proper place. I have met with one case in which profound melancholia