That women bear sexual excesses better than men was noted by Cabanis and other early writers.  Alienists frequently refer to the fact that women are less liable to be affected by insanity following such excesses. (See, e.g., Maudsley, “Relations between Body and Mind,” Lancet, May 28, 1870; and G. Savage, art.  “Marriage and Insanity” in Dictionary of Psychological Medicine.) Trousseau remarked on the fact that women are not exhausted by repeated acts of coitus within a short period, notwithstanding that the nervous excitement in their case is as great, if not greater, and he considered that this showed that the loss of semen is a cause of exhaustion in men.  Loewenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, pp. 74, 153) states that there cannot be question that the nervous system in women is less influenced by the after-effects of coitus than in men.  Not only, he remarks, are prostitutes very little liable to suffer from nervous overstimulation, and neurasthenia and hysteria when occurring in them be easily traceable to other causes, but “healthy women who are not given to prostitution, when they indulge in very frequent sexual intercourse, provided it is practised normally, do not experience the slightest injurious effect.  I have seen many young married couples where the husband had been reduced to a pitiable condition of nervous prostration and general discomfort by the zeal with which he had exercised his marital duties, while the wife had been benefited and was in the uninterrupted enjoyment of the best health.”  This experience is by no means uncommon.

A correspondent writes:  “It is quite true that the threshold of excess is less easily reached by women than by men.  I have found that women can reach the orgasm much more frequently than men.  Take an ordinary case.  I spend two hours with ——.  I have the orgasm 3 times, with difficulty; she has it 6 or 8, or even 10 or 12, times.  Women can also experience it a second or third time in succession, with no interval between.  Sometimes the mere fact of realizing that the man is having the orgasm causes the woman to have it also, though it is true that a woman usually requires as many minutes to develop the orgasm as a man does seconds.”  I may also refer to the case recorded in another part of this volume in which a wife had the orgasm 26 times to her husband’s twice.

Hutchinson, under the name of post-marital amblyopia (Archives of Surgery, vol. iv, p. 200), has described a condition occurring in men in good health who soon after marriage become nearly blind, but recover as soon as the cause is removed.  He mentions no cases in women due to coitus, but finds that in women some failure of sight may occur after parturition.

Naecke states that, in his experience, while masturbation is, apparently, commoner in insane men than in insane women, masturbation repeated several times a day is much commoner in the