Der Hauptvortreter der Neumalthusianische Lehre,” appeared in the Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, March, 1908).  There are now societies and periodicals in all civilized countries for the propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles, as they are still commonly called, though it would be desirable to avoid the use of Malthus’s name in this connection.  In the medical profession, the advocacy of preventive methods of sexual intercourse, not on social, but on medical and hygienic grounds, began same thirty years ago, though in France, at an earlier date, Raciborski advocated the method of avoiding the neighborhood of menstruation.  In Germany, Dr. Mensinga, the gynaecologist, is the most prominent advocate, on medical and hygienic grounds, of what he terms “facultative sterility,” which he first put forward about 1889.  In Russia, about the same time, artificial sterility was first openly advocated by the distinguished gynaecologist, Professor Ott, at the St. Petersburg Obstetric and Gynaecological Society.  Such medical recommendations, in particular cases, are now becoming common.

There are certain cases in which a person ought not to marry at all; this is so, for instance, when there has been an attack of insanity; it can never be said with certainty that a person who has had one attack of insanity will not have another, and persons who have had such attacks ought not, as Blandford says (Lumleian Lectures on Insanity, British Medical Journal, April 20, 1895), “to inflict on their partner for life, the anxiety, and even danger, of another attack.”  There are other and numerous cases in which marriage may be permitted, or may have already taken place, under more favorable circumstances, but where it is, or has become, highly desirable that there should be no children.  This is the case when a first attack of insanity occurs after marriage, the more urgently if the affected party is the wife, and especially if the disease takes the form of puerperal mania.  “What can be more lamentable,” asks Blandford (loc. cit.), “than to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight children, the recovery between each being less and less, until she is almost a chronic maniac?” It has been found, moreover, by Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts.  In cases of unions between persons with tuberculous antecedents, also, it is held by many (e.g., by Massalongo, in discussing tuberculosis and marriage at the Tuberculosis Congress, at Naples, in 1900) that every precaution should be taken to make the marriage childless.  In a third class of cases, it is necessary to limit the children to one or two; this happens in some forms of heart disease, in which pregnancy has a progressively deteriorating effect on the heart