their own childhood.  (I here leave out of account the widespread practice among nurses of soothing very young children in their charge by manipulating the sexual organs.)

A medical correspondent, in emphasizing this point, writes that “many boys will tell you that, if a nurse-girl is allowed to sleep in the same room with them, she will attempt sexual manipulations.  Either the girl gets into bed with the boy and pulling him on to her tickles the penis and inserts it into the vulva, making the boy imitate sexual movements, or she simply masturbates the child, to get him excited and interested, often showing him the female sexual opening in herself or in his sisters, teaching him to finger it.  In fact, a nurse-girl may ruin a boy, chiefly, I think, because she has been brought up to regard the sexual organs as a mystery, and is in utter ignorance about them.  She thus takes the opportunity of investigating the boy’s penis to find out how it works, etc., in order to satisfy her curiosity.  I know of a case in which a nurse in a fashionable London Square garden used to collect all the boys and girls (gentlemen’s children) in a summer-house when it grew dark, and, turning up her petticoats, invite all the boys to look at and feel her vulva, and also incite the older boys of 12 or 14 to have coitus with her.  Girls are afraid of pregnancy, so do not allow an adult penis to operate.  I think people should take on a far higher class of nurses, than they do.”

“Children ought never to be allowed, under any circumstances whatever,” wrote Lawson Tait (Diseases of Women, 1889, p. 62), “to sleep with servants.  In every instance where I have found a number of children affected [by masturbation] the contagion has been traced to a servant.”  Freud has found (Neurologisches Centralblatt, No. 10, 1896) that in cases of severe youthful hysteria the starting point may frequently be traced to sexual manipulations by servants, nurse-girls, and governesses.

“When I was about 8 or 9,” a friend writes, “a servant-maid of our family, who used to carry the candle out of my bedroom, often drew down the bedclothes and inspected my organs.  One night she put the penis in her mouth.  When I asked her why she did it her answer was that ‘sucking a boy’s little dangle’ cured her of pains in her stomach.  She said that she had done it to other little boys, and declared that she liked doing it.  This girl was about 16; she had lately been ‘converted.’  Another maid in our family used to kiss me warmly on the naked abdomen when I was a small boy.  But she never did more than that.  I have heard of various instances of servant-girls tampering with boys before puberty, exciting the penis to premature erection by manipulation, suction, and contact with their own parts.”  Such overstimulation must necessarily in some cases have an injurious influence on the boy’s immature nervous system.  Thus,