masculine; temperament neurotic.  He improved under treatment, and, after seeing me three times and writing out the above history, came no more.”

HISTORY XII.—­Mrs. B., aged 32.  Father’s family normal; mother’s family clever, eccentric, somewhat neuropathic.  She is herself normal, good-looking, usually healthy, highly intelligent, and with much practical ability, though at some periods of life, and especially in childhood, she has shared to some extent in the high-strung and supersensitive temperament of her mother’s family.  As a child she was sometimes spoiled and sometimes cuffed, and suffered tortures from nervousness.  She has, however, acquired a large measure of self-control.

The first sensations which she now recognizes as sexual were experienced at the age of 3, when her mother gave her an injection; afterward she declared herself unable to relieve her bowels naturally in order to obtain a repetition of this experience, which was several times repeated.  At the age of 7 a man pursued her with attentions and attempted to take liberties, but she rejected his advances in terror; four years later another man attempted to assault her, but she resisted vigorously, struck him, and escaped by running.  Neither of these sexual attempts appears to have left any serious permanent impression on the child’s mind.

At the age of 11, when her mother was giving her a bath, the sensation of her mother’s fingers touching her private parts gave her what she now knows to be sexual feelings, and a year later when taking her bath she would pour hot water on to the sexual region in order to cause these sensations; this did not lead to masturbation, but she had a vague idea that it was “wrong.”

At the age of 12 menstruation began; she suffered very severely from dysmenorrhea, the period sometimes lasting for ten days, and the pain being often extreme.  She was not treated for this condition, her mother being of opinion that she would outgrow it.  From the age of 14 or 15 until 23, or about the period of her marriage, she suffered from anemia.

She had little curiosity about sexual matters; her mother wished that she should always come to her for information about things she became acquainted with as to the general facts of sex; she did not, however, know definitely the facts of copulation until her marriage.  She knew nothing of erection or semen, and thought that when a man and woman placed their organs together a child resulted.  She hated talking about these subjects indecently, and would not listen to the sexual conversation of her schoolfellows.  She never felt any homosexual attraction.  Once another girl was much in love with her, but she despised and disliked her attentions; again, when a girl much older than herself, a friend of her mother’s, slept with her and made advances, she repelled her and refused to sleep with her again.