girls suffer for every one boy.
As regards circumscribed facial atrophy, which usually begins during
childhood, a preponderance of the disease in the female sex is also
noticeable. Hysteria was formerly regarded as a typically feminine
disease, and although this view has now been shown to be erroneous, the
fact remains that girls and women are far more often affected than boys
and men. As regards hysteria in childhood, Bruns[19] states that the
ratio of girls affected is to boys affected as 2:1. It is interesting to
note that in the earlier years of childhood, prior, that is to say, to
the age of nine years or thereabouts, no marked difference exists in the
sex incidence of hysteria, the cases being distributed in the
proportion, 55 per cent. girls, 45 per cent. boys; but after the age of
nine, the proportion of girls affected with hysteria increases, while
that of boys diminishes. Eulenburg,[20] indeed, records 17 cases of
hysteria, affecting children at ages nine to fourteen years; of these
nine were boys, and eight girls. Clopatt, on the other hand, collected
from the literature of the subject 272 cases of hysteria in young
children, 96 being boys, and 176 girls. Typhoid is commoner in males;
and Moebius lays stress on the fact, which he regards as especially
striking, that the difference in the sex-incidence of this disease is
manifest even in childhood. As regards colour-blindness, there is a
notable preponderance among males, and since we here have to do with a
congenital affection, this preponderance is as marked among children as
among adults. Many defects of speech also exhibit a notable difference
in their sex-incidence. Hermann Gutzmann[21] has shown that in the case
of stammerers we find 71 per cent. boys and 29 per cent. girls. I take
this opportunity of referring briefly to the fact that, as Max
Marcuse[22] reports, certain diseases of the skin exhibit sexual
differentiation of type even during childhood. The disseminated
cutaneous gangrene of children is far more frequent in girls than it is
in boys; Broker, among twelve cases, found ten girls. Alopecia areata,
on the other hand, affects both sexes with equal frequency, but affects
them at different ages. Whereas during the first years of life girls are
more frequently attacked; when the age of twenty is passed, the relation
between the sexes in this respect are reversed.
Criminological experiences appear also to confirm the notion of an
inherited sexual
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