A skilled surgeon can cut almost anything out of a person’s body, but he cannot cut out an instinct.  It sometimes takes great skill to determine whether the trouble is an organic affection or a functional disturbance caused by the misdirected instinct of reproduction.  Often, however, the clinical pictures are so different as to leave no room for doubt, provided the diagnostician has his eyes open and is not over-persuaded by the importunity of the poor neurotic, who insists that the surgeon shall remove her appendix, her gall-bladder, her genital organs, and her tonsils, and who finally comes back that he may have a whack at the operation scar.

=The Bearing of Children.= A number of years ago I became acquainted with a charming young married woman who had all her life recoiled with fear from the phenomena of sex.  She had been afraid of menstruation and of marriage, and had at this time almost a phobia for pregnancy and childbirth.  Before long she came to me in terror, telling me that she had become pregnant.  I explained to her that pregnancy is the time when most women are at their best, that the nausea which is often troublesome in the beginning is caused merely by a mixing of messages from the autonomic nerves, which refer new sensations in the womb to the more usual center of activity in the stomach; and that after the body has become accustomed to these sensations, most women experience a greater sense of well-being and peace than at any other time in life.  We had a conversation or two on the subject and everything seemed to go well for a while.

As it happened, this young woman and her husband came to call on me one afternoon just before the baby was expected.  During the visit she began to show signs of being in labor.  Again she was in terror.  Again I explained the phenomena of labor, telling her that the womb-contractions are caused by the presence in the blood of a chemical secretion (hormone) which continues its good work as long as there is a state of confidence, but which sometimes stops under fear or apprehension.  I explained that these womb-efforts are a peristaltic movement, a contraction of the upper muscles and a letting go of the purse-string muscle at the mouth of the womb, and that fear only tends to tie up this purse-string muscle, making a difficult process out of one which was intended by Nature to be much more simple.  She seemed to understand and to lose a good deal of her fright.

About six o’clock the couple went home on the street car from the upper end of Pasadena to the far end of Los Angeles.  The next morning I had a jubilant telephone message from the happy father, announcing that the boy-baby had arrived at midnight and that, wonderful to relate, he had come without the mother’s experiencing any pain whatever.

I give this account for what it is worth, without of course contending that labor could always be as easy as this.  It happened that this girl was a normal, healthy woman and that there were no complications of any kind in the process of childbirth.  A right attitude of mind could not have corrected any physical difficulty, but it did seem to help her let go of her fear, which would of itself have caused long and painful labor.