27 per cent. to headaches, 30 per cent. to backaches, 29 per cent. were habitually constipated, 16 per cent. had abnormal heart sounds; only 23 per cent. were free from functional disturbances.  Dr. Helen MacMurchey, in an interesting paper on “Physiological Phenomena Preceding or Accompanying Menstruation” (Lancet, Oct. 5, 1901), by inquiries among one hundred medical women, nurses, and women teachers in Toronto concerning the presence or absence of twenty-one different abnormal menstrual phenomena, found that between 50 and 60 per cent. admitted that they were liable at this time to disturbed sleep, to headache, to mental depression, to digestive disturbance, or to disturbance of the special senses, while about 25 to 50 per cent. were liable to neuralgia, to vertigo, to excessive nervous energy, to defective nervous and muscular power, to cutaneous hyperaesthesia, to vasomotor disturbances, to constipation, to diarrhoea, to increased urination, to cutaneous eruption, to increased liability to take cold, or to irritating watery discharges before or after the menstrual discharge.  This inquiry is of much interest, because it clearly brings out the marked prevalence at menstruation of conditions which, though not necessarily of any gravity, yet definitely indicate decreased power of resistance to morbid influences and diminished efficiency for work.

How serious an impediment menstrual troubles are to a woman is indicated by the fact that the women who achieve success and fame seem seldom to be greatly affected by them.  To that we may, in part, attribute the frequency with which leaders of the women’s movement have treated menstruation as a thing of no importance in a woman’s life.  Adele Gerhard, and Helene Simon, also, in their valuable and impartial work, Mutterschaft und Geistige Arbeit (p. 312), failed to find, in their inquiries among women of distinguished ability, that menstruation was regarded as seriously disturbing to work.

Of late the suggestion that adolescent girls shall not only rest from work during two days of the menstrual period, but have an entire holiday from school during the first year of sexual life, has frequently been put forward, both from the medical and the educational side.  At the meeting of the Association of Registered Medical Women, already referred to, Miss Sturge spoke of the good results obtained in a school where, during the first two years after puberty, the girls were kept in bed for the first two days of each menstrual period.  Some years ago Dr. G.W.  Cook ("Some Disorders of Menstruation,” American Journal of Obstetrics, April, 1896), after giving cases in point, wrote:  “It is my deliberate conviction that no girl should be confined at study during the year of her puberty, but she should live an outdoor life.”  In an article on “Alumna’s Children,” by “An Alumna” (Popular Science Monthly, May, 1904), dealing with the sexual invalidism