Sex and Society eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 234 pages of information about Sex and Society.

Sex and Society eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 234 pages of information about Sex and Society.
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======== | Men |Deaths|| Women |Deaths ---------------------------+----------+------++---------+---
--- Amputations................|1144 cases| 441 ||284 cases| 83 |-----------------++---------------- |or, 38.56 deaths || 29.29 deaths | per 100 || per 100 ------------------------------------------------------------
--- A difference of 9.27 per cent. in favor of women.

Legouest states in the same article that the lowest mortality of all is in children from 5 to 15 years of age.  Ellis quotes a passage from a paper read by Lombroso at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology held in London: 

Billroth experimented on women when attempting a certain operation (excision of the pylorus) for the first time, judging that they were less sensitive and therefore more disvulnerable, i.e., better able to resist pain.  Carle assured me that women would let themselves be operated upon almost as though their flesh were an alien thing.  Giordano told me that even the pains of childbirth caused relatively little suffering to women, in spite of their apprehensions.  Dr. Martini, one of the most distinguished dentists of Turin, has informed me of the amazement he has felt at seeing women endure more easily and courageously than men every kind of dental operation.  Mela, too, has found that men will, under such circumstances, faint oftener than women.[73]

The same tolerance of pain and misery in women is shown by an examination of the number of male and female suicides from physical suffering.  Von Oettingen states that in 30,000 cases the percentage of suicides from physical suffering was in men 11.4, in women 11.3;[74] and Lombroso, following Morselli, gives the following table representing the proportion out of a hundred suicides of each sex resulting from the same cause:[75]

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|   Men   |  Women
----------------------------------+---------+----------
Germany (1852-61).................|   9.61  |   8.08
Prussia (1869-77).................|   6.00  |   7.00
Saxony (1875-78)..................|   4.61  |   6.21
Belgium...........................|   1.34  |   0.84
France (1873-78) .................|  14.28  |  13.56
Italy (1866-77)...................|   6.70  |   8.50
Vienna (1851-59)..................|   9.20  |  10.04
Vienna (1869-78)..................|   7.73  |  70.37
Paris (1851-59)...................|  10.27  |  11.22
Madrid (1884).....................|  31.81  |  31.25
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But these figures represent the numbers of suicides in each hundred of either sex, whereas suicide is three to four times as frequent among men as among women, and the absolute proportion of suicide among men from physical pain is, therefore, overwhelmingly great.  Still more significant is a table given by Lombroso showing the percentage of suicides from want:[76]

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Sex and Society from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.