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.
