or normal relationships.  He has shown that chlorosis is but the exaggeration of a condition that is normal at puberty (and, in many women, at each menstrual period), and which, there is good reason to believe, even has a favorable influence on fertility.  He found that light-complexioned persons are more fertile than the dark-complexioned, and that at the same time the blood of the latter is of less specific gravity, containing less haemoglobin.  Lloyd Jones also reached the generalization that girls who have had chlorosis are often remarkably pretty, so that the tendency to chlorosis is associated with all the sexual and reproductive aptitudes that make a woman attractive to a man.  His conclusion is that the normal condition of which chlorosis is the extreme and pathological condition, is a preparation for motherhood (E.  Lloyd Jones, “Chlorosis:  The Special Anaemia of Young Women,” 1897; also numerous reports to the British Medical Association, published in the British Medical Journal.  There was an interesting discussion of the theories of chlorosis at the Moscow International Medical Congress, in 1898; see proceedings of the congress, volume in, section v, pp. 224 et seq.).

We may thus, perhaps, understand why it is that hysteria and anaemia are often combined, and why they are both most frequently found in adolescent young women who have yet had no sexual experiences.  Chlorosis is a physical phenomenon; hysteria, largely a psychic phenomenon; yet, both alike may, to some extent at least, be regarded as sexual aptitude showing itself in extreme and pathological forms.

FOOTNOTES: 

[251] Genese et Nature de l’Hysterie, 1898; and, for Sollier’s latest statement, see “Hysterie et Sommeil,” Archives de Neurologie, May and June, 1907.  Lombroso (L’Uomo Delinquente, 1889, vol. ii, p. 329), referring to the diminished metabolism of the hysterical, had already compared them to hibernating animals, while Babinsky states that the hysterical are in a state of subconsciousness, a state, as Metchnikoff remarks (Essais optimistes, p. 270), reminiscent of our prehistoric past.

[252] Professor Freud, while welcoming the introduction of the term “auto-erotism,” remarks that it should not be made to include the whole of hysteria.  This I fully admit, and have never questioned.  Hysteria is far too large and complex a phenomenon to be classed as entirely a manifestation of auto-erotism, but certain aspects of it are admirable illustrations of auto-erotic transformation.

[253] The hysterical phenomenon of globus hystericus was long afterward attributed to obstruction of respiration by the womb.  The interesting case has been recorded by E. Bloch (Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, 1907, p. 1649) of a lady who had the feeling of a ball rising from her stomach to her throat, and then sinking.  This feeling was associated with thoughts of her husband’s rising and falling penis, and was always most liable to occur when she wished for coitus.