PRACTICAL PROBLEMS 347 



difficulties of civilized women are very much greater, for few 

 of them are able to pursue their occupations for a fortnight 

 or more after parturition. Their difficulties increase with each 

 successive generation. At the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, according to the statistics of the Rotunda Hospital, 

 instrumental aid was given to women on the average once 

 in 608 cases. Probably it is now given twenty times as 

 often. No doubt much of this change is due to the greater 

 skill and confidence acquired by medical men ; but certainly 

 not all of it. Every medical man in ordinary practice sees 

 many cases in which the woman would perish but for his aid. 



536. Several attempts have been made to explain this grow- 

 ing disproportion between the child's head and the maternal 

 pelvis. Sir James Simpson supposed that parental education 

 increased the size of the child's brain ; but this hypothesis 

 involves the fallacy of Lamarckianism. Again, it has been 

 supposed that the occupations of civilized women are the 

 cause of the disproportion ; but, since women of all classes are 

 almost equally affected, this explanation cannot be correct. 

 It is difficult, for example, to understand why a fishwife or 

 the wife of a country labourer should have a more contracted 

 pelvis than a savage. Yet again it has been supposed that the 

 disproportion has been caused by the prevalence of rickets. 

 No doubt some civilized women, especially among the urban 

 populations, are more or less deformed from this cause ; but 

 it cannot furnish the sole nor even the principal explanation, 

 for difficult labours are common even in such remote rural 

 districts as the Orkneys and the Hebrides, where the dietetic 

 habits of the people have altered very little. 



537. The explanation is probably found when we remember 

 the constantly increasing skill and care with which women 

 are treated after child-birth. Civilized women would perish 

 in multitudes did they receive no better treatment than 

 their savage sisters. Savage races, therefore, are kept very 

 strictly purged of narrow-hipped women and large-headed 

 children. But wherever the skilled nurse and doctor have 

 penetrated such women and children have been preserved in 

 large and constantly increasing numbers, to transmit their 

 characteristics to offspring. A type is surviving which was 

 eliminated formerly, and consequently the race is undergoing 

 change. Here, then, is another practical problem of heredity. 

 Unless some means be found to reduce the number of births 

 from families in which difficult labours are common, the 

 curse on women will grow in magnitude with each generation 

 till at length no child is born without surgical aid. 



