1 88 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



the childless woman. The frequency with which 

 malignant disease attacks the womb, breast, and other 

 organs in this class is generally set down as the 

 result of an abnormal state of those organs, because 

 of their never having been called upon to perform 

 the functions for which they were designed; but I 

 would argue that the degenerate state of the system, 

 which ultimately shows itself in cancerous growth, 

 brought about the barrenness, rather than that the 

 absence of physiological activity was the cause of the 

 disease. In support of this theory, which I believe 

 has never before been advanced, I would point out 

 that a large number of the children of cancerous 

 parents, who themselves may never develop cancer, 

 are childless. We have an example of this in the 

 family whose history I have just given, in which no 

 less than two married daughters and one married 

 son were childless. Further, I would point out that 

 cancer does not attack the unmarried woman, in 

 whom the functions of the generative organs are in 

 total abeyance, to anything like the same extent 

 that it does the barren married woman, in whom the 

 organs are submitted in a great degree to the nervous 

 excitement necessary for their functional health. The 

 children of the cancerous are undoubtedly deficient in 

 vitality, and the deficiency may make itself evident 

 in barrenness, as it may in idiocy, or scrofula, or 

 epilepsy, or insanity. In my opinion the barren 

 woman who develops cancer, or who is the daughter 

 of a markedly cancerous stock, is barren from the 



