obin. A special
kind of anemia affecting young girls is called chlorosis.

Anemia and chlorosis cannot be considered contra-indications to
marriage, because they are usually amenable to treatment. In fact,
some cases of anemia and chlorosis are due to the lack of normal
sexual relations, and the subjects get well very soon after marriage.
But it is best and safest to subject anemic patients to a course of
treatment and to improve their condition before they marry.

=Epilepsy=

While epilepsy--known commonly as fits or falling sickness--is not as
hereditary as it was one time thought to be, its hereditary character
being ascertainable in only about 5 per cent. of cases, nevertheless,
it is a decidedly dysgenic agent, and marriage with an epileptic is
distinctly advised against. Where both parents are epileptics, the
children are almost sure to be epileptic, and such a marriage should
be prohibited by law. Under no circumstances should parents who are
both epileptic bring children into the world. It should be the duty of
the State to instruct them in methods of preventing conception.

=Hysteria=

Hysteria is a disease the chief characteristics of which are a _lack
of control_ over one's emotions and acts, the _imitation_ of the
symptoms of various diseases, and an _exaggerated_ self-consciousness.
The patient may have extreme pain in the region of the head, ovaries,
spine; in some parts of the skin there is extreme hypersensitiveness
(hyperesthesia), so that the least touch causes great pain; in others,
there is complete anesthesia--that is, absence of sensation--so that
when you stick the patient with a needle she will not feel it. A very
frequent symptom is a choking sensation, as if a ball came up the
throat and stuck there (globus hystericus). Then there may be spasms,
convulsions, retention of urine, paralysis, aphonia (loss of voice),
blindness, and a lot more. There is hardly a functional or organic
nervous disorder that hysteria may not simulate.

Of late years our ideas about hysteria have undergone a radical
change, and we now know that most, if not all, cases of hysteria are
due to a repression or non-satisfaction of the sexual instinct or to
some shock of a sexual character in childhood. Only too often a girl
who was very hysterical before marriage loses her hysteria as if by
magic upon contracting a _satisfactory_ marriage. On the other hand, a
healthy girl can become quickly hysterical if she marr