Sterility must be numbered among the infirmities induced by excessive
corpulence. This is a well attested fact in reference to the human
species, and also as to the females of the lower animals. One of the
professors in the Medical Faculty of Paris, while explaining in his
lectures how fat could interfere with conception, never failed to
cite the practice of the peasantry, who hastened to send to market
those hens which became excessively fat, because they then ceased to
lay eggs. Even plants lose their fertility by excess of fat. A plant
growing in a cultivated soil where it finds a superabundance of food
becomes sterile, because the stamens are transformed into petals,
causing double flowers.
The rule is, in order that a woman should be capable of conception,
that she should be regular--that is to say, that she should lose each
month a certain quantity of blood. Now it is asserted by medical men
that, in general, those women who are thin, and who are almost without
exception fertile, lose much more blood than fat women. Menstruation
lasts with them from five to ten days, whilst fat women lose but very
little blood during two or three days at the most. It may be added that
in the first of these three days the loss is considerable, the second
day there is scarcely any, and on the third day there is more, but it
then ceases.
Just in proportion as a thin woman becomes fat, her menstrual flow
diminishes, and so much the more speedily, the quicker she becomes fat.
Some women who have thus increased in fat have ceased to menstruate
at thirty-five, at twenty-five, and even at twenty years of age. Some
young girls, regular at twelve or fourteen years of age, on becoming
fat, have ceased to menstruate and become chlorotic.
One great result of the anti-obesic treatment is, that while destroying
the excessive amount of fat, it causes women to become regular, and
thus favours conception.
Thin men in general possess greater virility than those surcharged with
fat, and in proportion as this fat is developed virility is impaired
and finally lost. This infirmity happens to many corpulent men at
fifty, forty-five and even forty years of age. Some who were very very
fat at the age of puberty, have been impotent throughout life. There
are facts which prove that virility in man, like fertility in woman,
may be restored on losing a superabundance of fat.