ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the diseases which the affected women in vulnerable age groups are not "women's diseases" but ailments that more often claimed the lives of women than of men. When women lived less long than men, it was mainly because they got TB more often—and also were slightly more affected by the diseases of filth and insanitation. When the tubercle bacillus settles elsewhere in the body, the disease has no particular gender pattern; but when it settles in the lungs, it has in the past been, for unclear reasons, a disease of girls and young women. Women of all ages seem to have been more afflicted with heart problems than have men. One fascinating finding is how many more women than men died from ailments of the gut tube and the abdominal organs. Women were more liable than men to die at certain ages because their lives at those ages were much harder than men's, and their resistance to infection was lower.
