Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The Influence Of The Glands Of Internal Secretion Upon The Faculty Of Thinking And The Origin Of Mental Disorders. It is possible to observe that during menstruation many women are very excitable, even highly nervous. Their power of thinking is also frequently limited, and they are not in the mood to do anything in, the line of mental work. When I once visited the Telephone Central station of a very large town in company of one of the directors who was my patient, he made the remark that at certain times some of the girls employed require great leniency, and that their failings may be attributed to physiological causes. During my inspecting tours through the large female jails of the United States, the matrons, in response to my inquiries, also informed me that during such time the prisoners are very unmanageable, while at other times they behave themselves very quietly. The symptoms may be still more stormy when the menstruation is accompanied by pain or when other disturbances are present due to changes in the ovaries and in the uterus. Mental disturbances, and even true mental diseases, may break out. Such observations were made thirty-three years ago by B. S. Schultze in Jena on patients suffering from misplacements and inflammations of the ovaries and the uterus. After successful gynecological treatment a decided improvement of the nervous and mental disorders took place. When, however, there was a recurrence of the disorders of the genital organs the mental derangement could again be noted. It is, therefore, necessary in mentally diseased females to pay particular attention to the condition of the genital organs. I have observed quite frequently in many female inmates of asylums symptoms which pointed to changes or non-development of the genitalia....