Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/313

Rh differences which constitute sex. The fact that the ratio of the extent to which women perpetrate crimes against property is to crimes against persons the same as the ratio of strength between men and women, proves that her less degree of physical power, which is a sexual property, so affects mental action that her deliberate acts are capable of tabulation, and, contrasted with those of men, show a constant series of differences year by year. Were it otherwise, we would expect that these uniform ratios, which point so unerringly to the workings of a law, would disappear, and in their place we should have tabulated confusion.

We obtained an idea of love differentially as it exists in the sexes by observing the degree to which it affects men and women as a probable cause of insanity. In the same manner I think we can gain a knowledge of the comparative intensity with which emotions and states of consciousness, common to both sexes, exist in intellection, by observing the extent to which they react as a probable cause of mental alienation. For my purpose I shall use Dr. Kirkbride's report for the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane. The analysis is based upon the supposed causes of insanity in 6,899 cases. Domestic difficulties are the probable causes of mental disease in 47 men and 86 women. Nearly two to one expresses the difference in intensity in the action of this cause. Fright resulted in insanity in 16 men and 36 women. Grief affected 77 men and 256 women, a difference of more than three to one. Religious excitement acts as the cause in 79 men and 127 women, a difference of sixty-two per cent. Nostalgia, 7 women, and no men. From mental anxiety there are 164 men and 261 women insane. These causes, which present such dissimilarity, have one bond of union; they affect the emotional part of the psychical nature. From this I would not conclude that women are less able to bear the operation of these exciting causes than men; but, that the emotional nature of woman is more largely developed, and thus more exposed to the action of such causes as directly affect it. If I am right in this, we would expect to see in women the emotional forms of insanity developed in excess of the same in men; and this is just what we find. Continuing to analyze the tables of Dr. Kirkbride relating to the same cases as above, we find the number of women to be 3,220, the number of men exceeding them by 459; and yet, there are 1,032 cases of melancholia among the women to 832 in men. Prof. Maudsley defines this form of insanity as "great oppression of the self-feeling, with corresponding gloomy morbid idea."

The emotions, it is evident, are both the main recipients of the cause and the field of its morbid expression. Now, from what we know of the mental and physical constitution of woman, we should expect to find this form of insanity developed in excess of all others at the period of greatest sexual activity, and consequently of greatest