The chief thesis of this work is that the school does not exist to benefit psychopathic individuals, but that teachers of the future must be more or less acquainted with the clinic of puberty, in order to understand their children in general during their most critical period of life, and in order to distinguish between what is normal and what is abnormal in them.
In his previous five volumes of studies, the author has dealt with the sex impulse mainly in relation to its object, leaving out of account the external persons and the environmental influences. In this volume he now considers its relations to society and discusses in a more summary way the manifold, important problems that are presented. The previous work entered a more or less neglected field, which required analytic care and precision; but the ground covered by this volume is more worked. It treats of the mother and her child, sexual education, nakedness, evaluation of sex love, the function of chastity, the problem of abstinence, prostitution, the conquest of venereal diseases, sexual morality, marriage, the art of love and the science of procreation.
The author first treats of propagation in animals and plants, of the human organs, of pre-marital hygiene and regimen for boys and girls, the ethnology and early history of marriage, sexual hygiene within it, prostitution, diseases, abnormalities, stages of development, with final sections on the right of motherhood, free love, flirtation, emancipation of women and sexual education.
The writer treats first the sexual epoch of the menarche its retardation, acceleration and its pathology generally, the causes of the determination of sex, fertility, sterility, various abnormalities, the age of senescence—its normality and pathology. The work is enriched by ninety-seven cuts.
Although the author is a professor of sex and skin diseases, his book has a certain pathos for it is devoted largely to a description of cases where syphilis has been pandemic, that is, epidemic or endemic, and where it has been sporadic in various senses, and a description of very many ways by which in the modern clinic it is found to be imparted to the innocent.
This book consists of a course of five and thirty lectures delivered in the University of Bern. The author is well known as being not
