from the general and local oppression, I lie on my stomach and obtain ejaculation.  I am at once relieved; a weight seems to be lifted from my chest, and sleep returns.”  This patient consulted Gamier as to whether this artificial relief was not more dangerous than the sufferings it relieved.  Gamier advised that if the ordinary regime of a well-ordered monastry, together with anaphrodisiac sedatives, proved inefficacious, the manoeuvre might be continued when necessary (P.  Garnier, Celibat et Celibataires, 1887, p. 320).  H.C.  Coe (American Journal of Obstetrics, p. 766, July, 1889) gives the case of a married lady who was deeply sensitive of the wrong nature of masturbation, but found in it the only means of relieving the severe ovarian pain, associated with intense sexual excitement, which attended menstruation.  During the intermenstrual period the temptation was absent.  Turnbull knew a youth who found that masturbation gave great relief to feelings of heaviness and confusion which came on him periodically; and Wigglesworth has frequently seen masturbation after epileptic fits in patients who never masturbated at other times.  Moll (Libido Sexualis, Bd.  I, p. 13) refers to a woman of 28, an artist of nervous and excitable temperament, who could not find sexual satisfaction with her lover, but only when masturbating, which she did once or twice a day, or oftener; without masturbation, she said, she would be in a much more nervous state.  A friend tells me of a married lady of 40, separated from her husband on account of incompatibility, who suffered from irregular menstruation; she tried masturbation, and, in her own words, “became normal again;” she had never masturbated previously.  I have also been informed of the case of a young unmarried woman, intellectual, athletic, and well developed, who, from the age of seven or eight, has masturbated nearly every night before going to sleep, and would be restless and unable to sleep if she did not.

Judging from my own observations among both sexes, I should say that in normal persons, well past the age of puberty, and otherwise leading a chaste life, masturbation would be little practiced except for the physical and mental relief it brings.  Many vigorous and healthy unmarried women or married women apart from their husbands, living a life of sexual abstinence, have asserted emphatically that only by sexually exciting themselves, at intervals, could they escape from a condition of nervous oppression and sexual obsession which they felt to be a state of hysteria.  In most cases this happens about the menstrual period, and, whether accomplished as a purely physical act—­in the same way as they would soothe a baby to sleep by rocking it or patting it—­or by the co-operation of voluptuous mental imagery, the practice is not cultivated for its own sake during the rest of the month.