SECTION II.
IMPOTENCE AND STERILITY OF THE FEMALE.
A female may be impotent, and not sterile; and sterile, but not impotent. Impotence can only exist in the female, when there is an impervious vagina; but even this condition does not necessarily infer sterility, many cases being recorded, where the semen, by some means or another, through an aperture that would not admit a fine probe, has found entrance to the vagina and occasioned impregnation.
Impotence may arise from a malformed pelvis, the absence of a vagina, adhesion of its labia, unruptured hymen, or one of such strength as to resist intromission. In the two former instances, sterility is irremediable; but art, and indeed nature, may overcome the latter impediments.
Were these pages intended only for the surgery, instead of the public, the annexed wood cuts would be unnecessary, medical men being conversant with the inconvenience in question; but all the world not being blessed with similar anatomical information, the sketches are presented. The upper one represents the relative situation of the female urethra (1), and the contracted orifice of the hymen (2). In the cases of hardened obstruction, where the hymen assumes an almost cartilaginous texture, the attempts at marital consummation are fruitless, and often give rise to severe local inflammation. The infirmity, on the other hand, is easily and painlessly removable by surgical skill. The lower drawing represents a hymen with two apertures (2), which, if broken down by violence, leaves a troublesome lacerated wound. The surgeon’s assistance is indispensable.
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Where hermaphroditism exists, the sex is usually more masculine; it is a vulgar error to suppose that the two sexes exist entire, and that they are capable of giving and receiving the offices of married life. The present sketch is merely introduced to show the more frequent malformation. The penis exists, but has no urethra: below is an opening resembling the vagina of the female, which is but of short length, at the bottom of which (in fact, the perineum) the urethra opens. The testicles are entire, and the individual from whom the draft was taken possessed somewhat the desire of the male, without the capability of penetration: the penis, when excited, from its attachment to the lips of the imaginary vagina, and also from its contracted form, presenting merely a kind of bulbous tumor. Even where hermaphroditism more closely partakes of the female, conception never takes place; hence all such parties are sterile.
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Nature, as if to atone for denying to some the delights of maternity, has been occasionally doubly bountiful to others. The annexed drawing exhibits a section of a double uterus. Cases are on record, where both have been impregnated.
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In the instance of a deceased married female, that fell under my observation, the uterus or womb presented the following appearances: The usual cavity was discoverable, but it was filled with a cheesy-like substance, and also there were some ulcered-looking caverns filled with the same material. This female, while living, endured continued pains in the uterine region, was insensible to marital physical enjoyments, sterile, although a wife several years, and the constant sufferer from a vaginal discharge. Her death was consequent upon a severe cold that ended in consumption.
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Leucorrhœa is often attended with barrenness; at all events, it is very debilitating, and thus impedes conception. A notion once prevailed, that women who did not menstruate could not conceive; it has since been disproved, except in those instances where menstruation never occurred: a single monthly discharge indicates an aptitude for conception. It is observed that barren women have very small breasts. Women who are very fat are often barren, for their corpulence either exists as a mark of weakness of the system, or it depends upon a want of activity in the ovaria: thus spayed or castrated animals generally become fat. The same remarks apply to the male kind, who are outrageously corpulent. There are many other peculiarities in matrimonial life, fertile subjects for speculation; such as, for instance, the lapse of time that often occurs after marriage before conception takes place, and the space between each act of gestation; the solution of which may be, that these occurrences are modified by certain aptitudes, dispositions, state of health, &c.; the same may explain why persons have lived together for years in unfruitful matrimony, and who yet, after being divorced, and marrying others, have both had children.
It is not always that the most healthy women are more favorable to conception than the spare and feeble. High feeding and starvation are alike occasionally inimical to breeding. The regularity of the “courses” appears principally essential to secure impregnation; and the intercourse is generally held likely to be the more fruitful that takes place early after that customary relief.
Women in health are capable of bearing children, on an average, for a period of thirty years, from the age of fifteen to forty-five; but their incapacity to procreate does not deny them the sexual gratification, it being well accredited, that women upward of seventy years of age have been known, who have lost but little of the amative inclination and enjoyment which they possessed in their early days. Men certainly possess their procreative power to a longer period, it being common for men to become fathers at eighty, ninety, and one hundred—old Parr becoming a parent at the age of one hundred and thirty. Women rarely fall pregnant beyond fifty.
Some females endure intense pain during coition, so as to occasion fainting or great exhaustion. Such suffering is usually traceable to internal ailments—such as piles, fistulous openings between the rectum and vagina, ulcerated wombs, vaginal tumors or abscesses. Cases continually present themselves, where, on the removal of the cause, the effect is cured.
The number of children that women have individually given birth to is very variable. It is attested, among a collection of facts of this nature, that one female gave birth to eighteen children at six births; another, forty-four children in all, thirty in the first marriage and fourteen in the second; and in a still more extraordinary case, fifty-three children in all, in one marriage, eighteen times single births, five times twins, four times triplets, once six, and once seven.[14] Men have been known to beget seventy or eighty children in two or more marriages. With regard to the average proportion of male and female births, it appears that the males predominate about four or five only in one hundred. The average number of children in each marriage is, in England, from five to seven.
To a continual irritability of temper among females may be ascribed infertility. Independently of ever fostering domestic disquietude, it produces thinness and feeble health; and, where pregnancy does ensue, it most frequently provokes miscarriages, or leads to the birth of ill-conditioned and puny offspring.
Perhaps one of the most indispensable and endearing qualifications of the feminine character is an amiable temper. Cold and callous must be the man who does not prize the meek and gentle spirit of a confiding woman. Her lips may not be sculptured in the line of perfect beauty, her eye may not roll in dazzling splendor, but if the native smile be ever ready to welcome, and the glance fraught with clinging devotion, or shrinking sensibility, she must be prized far above gold or rubies. A few moments of enduring silence would often prevent years of discord and unhappiness; but the keen retort and waspish argument too often break the chain of affection, link by link, and leave the heart with no tie to hold it but a cold and frigid duty.