when the asparagus blooms and the cicada sings loudest, is the season when women are most amorous, but men least inclined to pleasure.  Paulus AEgineta said that hysteria specially abounds during spring and autumn in lascivious girls and sterile women, while more recent observers have believed that hysteria is particularly difficult to treat in autumn.  Oribasius (Synopsis, lib. i, cap. 6) quotes from Rufus to the effect that sexual feeling is most strong in spring, and least so in summer.  Rabelais said that it was in March that the sexual impulse is strongest, referring this to the early warmth of spring, and that August is the month least favorable to sexual activity (Pantagruel, liv. v, Ch.  XXIX).  Nipho, in his book on love dedicated to Joan of Aragon, discussed the reasons why “women are more lustful and amorous in summer, and men in winter.”  Venette, in his Generation de l’homme, harmonized somewhat conflicting statements with the observation that spring is the season of love for both men and women; in summer, women are more amorous than men; in autumn, men revive to some extent, but are still oppressed by the heat, which, sexually, has a less depressing effect on women.  There is probably a real element of truth in this view, and both extremes of heat and cold may be regarded as unfavorable to masculine virility.  It is highly probable that the well-recognized tendency of piles to become troublesome in spring and in autumn, is due to increased sexual activity.  Piles are favored by congestion, and sexual excitement is the most powerful cause of sudden congestion in the genito-anal region.  Erasmus Darwin called attention to the tendency of piles to recur about the equinoxes (Zooenomia, Section XXXVI), and since his days Gant, Bonavia, and Cullimore have correlated this periodicity with sexual activity.

Laycock, quoting the opinions of some earlier authorities as to the prevalence of sexual feeling in spring, stated that that popular opinion “appears to be founded on fact” (Nervous Diseases of Women, p. 69).  I find that many people, and perhaps especially women, confirm from their own experience, the statement that sexual feeling is strongest in spring and summer.  Wichmann states that pollutions are most common in spring (being perhaps the first to make that statement), and also nymphomania.  (In the eighteenth century, Schurig recorded a case of extreme and life-long sexual desire in a woman whose salacity was always at its height towards the festival of St. John, Gynaecologia, p. 16.) A correspondent in the Argentine Republic writes to me that “on big estancias, where we have a good many shepherds, nearly always married, or, rather, I should say, living with some woman (for our standard of morality is not very high in these parts), we always look out for trouble in springtime, as it is a very common thing at this season for wives to leave their husbands and go and live with some other man.”