A
TREATISE
ON
The Crime of ONAN;
Illustrated with
A VARIETY of CASES,
Together with
The METHOD of CURE.

——Propriis extinctum vivere criminibus.

Gall.

By M. TISSOT, M. D.

Author of
Advice to the People in general with regard to
their Health.

Translated from
The Third Edition of the Original.

LONDON,
Printed for B. Thomas, in the Strand.
MDCCLXVI.

PREFACE.

While I was composing in Latin the Original of this small Production, I was sensible of its defects, and, in the Preface to it, made my apology for them. But, after the Performance appeared in print, they struck me much more forcibly; and when I came to examine the French translation of it, which I had been desired to revise, I judged them intolerable.

Besides a number of new observations necessarily to be added, there were faults to be remedied, in the method, and some articles which, being no more than the first outline, insufficient to convey what I had to say, required a fuller extent to be given them.

So many corrections rendered the Work almost a new one, and made it considerably longer. The difficulty of carrying on this undertaking in a living language, and all the disagreeable circumstances that must cleave to it, did not escape me. Nothing could have determined me to engage in it, but the prospect of the utility to mankind of such an undertaking well executed, which is, however, what I dare not boast of. It is only my intention that I can warrant. The crimes of one’s fellow creatures afford but a melancholic object to concern one’s self with: the consideration of them can only afflict and mortify one: a sentiment ballanced by no pleasure but that of hoping to contribute to the diminution of their frequency, and to alleviate the sufferings which are the consequences of them.

But what has given me much more trouble, in this Work, than if I had written it in Latin, is the embarrassment of expressing images, of which the terms and descriptions are declared indecent by use. A dispensation, however, from a due attention to these scruples would have been very disagreeable to my own disposition, with which I could never have reconciled any labor at the expence of what I pride myself on, a due regard for the laws of decency. Yet to this duty it is that are owing the great difficulties that stopped me at every step. I dare aver, then, that I have neglected no precaution for giving to this Work all the modesty in the expressions that the subject would admit. There are, indeed, certain objectionable images inseparable from this matter; but how could I avoid them? Was it fit for me, on such important objects, to keep silence? Doubtless not. The sacred Authors, the Fathers of the Church, who almost all wrote in living languages; the Theological Writers, have not thought themselves obliged to pass over in silence the crimes of obscenity, because they could not be pointed out without naming them, without words, in short. I judged myself authorised to follow their example, and I dare say, with St. Augustin, “If what I have written scandalizes any vitious persons, let them rather blame their own turpitude than the words which I have been obliged to make use of, for explaining my thoughts on the act of generation in mankind. I hope that the truly modest and virtuous reader will easily forgive the expressions which I have been forced to employ.” I will add to what this great Divine says, that I hope to merit the grateful acknowledgment and approbation of the moral and the sensible, who know the general proneness of the world to wicked practices, and who will approve, if not my success, at least the intention of my undertaking.

I have not in this, no more than in my first edition, touched upon the moral part, and that for Horace’s reason,

——Quod medicorum est

Promittunt Medici——

I have proposed to myself to write on the diseases produced by self-pollution, and not on the crime of self-pollution, considered as a crime; is it not proof enough of its being one, the demonstrating that it is an act of self-murther? Whoever knows mankind, will not be difficultly persuaded, that it is easier to give them an aversion against a vice, by the fear of a present evil, than by reasons founded on principles, of which there is not care enough taken to inculcate to them all the truth and solidity. I have applied to myself what an author, whose name will pass to the remotest posterity, as an honor to the age in which he lived, makes a Clergyman say: “We are put upon undertaking to prove the utility of prayer, to a man who does not believe there is a God; and the necessity of fasting, to one who has, all his life, denied the immortality of the soul: such an attempt is rather difficult, and the laugh is not on our side[1].” Marphurius doubted of every thing till Sganarelle broke his bones; and then Marphurius believed.

These Zoïluses of society and literature, who themselves do nothing, and blame every thing that is done, will have the assurance to say, that this Work is fitter to spread than to stop this vice, and that it will make it known to such as would otherwise have remained in ignorance of it. I shall make them no answer; they deserve none; it is debasing one’s self to do them that honor: but there are those of weak though virtuous minds, upon whom these objections might make an impression: to these I owe a general reflexion, it is this, that, in that point of light, my Book is liable to no worse exception than what might be made to all books of morality: they must be all prohibited, if pointing out the dangers of a vice was the way to multiply it. The sacred writings, those of the Fathers, those of the Casuists, ought all to be forbidden before mine is so. Besides, what young person is likely to think of reading a Treatise of Physic on a matter of which he does not so much as know the name? It is to be wished, indeed, that this Book were become familiar to all persons to whom the education of youth is committed; it might be of service to them to set an early watch; and detect, in time, any practice of this detestable habit; it would enable them to take the precautions they should judge necessary for preventing the consequences.

Those who do not understand Latin, will, perhaps, find fault with there being too many verses in that language; my answer is, that there are none which are not connected with the subject, since there is not one that was not recalled to my mind by the chain of ideas. I have, however, so disposed them, that they may be skipped without any injury to the thread of the discourse. Those who understand them, will rather be pleased with me for them: a traveller is, in the midst of a dreary barren heath, rejoiced at the sight of a spot of verdure. In short, if it is a fault, it is not, I hope, more than a venial one, and on so disgustful a subject, some relaxation from it may be forgiven the author. If there are no quotations from the Poets in our own language, which would have been more natural, that is no fault of mine; I knew of none to be quoted.

This Work, however, has nothing in common with the English one upon this subject, under the title of Onania; and except about two pages and a half, which I have extracted from it, that rhapsody has been of no use to me. Those who shall read both performances will, I hope, be sensible of the total difference there is between them. Those who shall only read this one of mine, might, without this advertence, be deceived by the affinity of the titles[2], and be led to imagine some resemblance between the two books; happily there is none.

This new edition, is, by the additions, augmented almost a third, and I hope they will meet with a favorable reception from all competent judges. There will probably be two objections made to me: the one, that I have added a great number of observations and authorities, which are little more than repetitions of those that were already in the first edition; the other, that in some places I have too much departed from my leading or principal title, and that I have considered the danger from the pleasures of love under a general point of view.

To the first objection, I answer, that in a matter of this nature, where there is less hope of convincing by reasons than of terrifying by examples, one can hardly accumulate too many.

To the second, I say, first, that when two matters are intimately connected, the more you endeavour to detach one, the worse you treat of it; secondly, that I was glad to render this Work of as much general utility as possible.

I have been told, that it is the reading of that part, that caused horror to an illustrious Professor: I do not believe it. But if it should be true, I would desire him to peruse this Preface, which I must suppose had in such case escaped him.

In writing upon Inoculation, I had proposed to myself to propagate the method that I judged the properest to stop the ravages of that murderous distemper; and I have had the satisfaction of doing, at least, some good: in composing this Work, I have been encouraged by the hope of checking the progress of a corruption more rife, more destructive perhaps than the small-pox itself, and so much the more to be dreaded, for that its operations being carried on in the shades of secrecy and mystery, it undermines without noise, without even those, who are its victims, suspecting its malignity. It was of the greatest importance to make its dangers known. May that Power, to whom every thing is subordinate, vouchsafe to my views that blessing without which our best endeavours can be of no avail! Paul plants, Apollos cultivates, but increase is from God alone.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

Man is every instant losing something of himself, and if he was not continually repairing that loss, he would soon necessarily fall into a weakness productive of death. This reparation is effected by aliments. But these aliments must undergo in the body different preparations, which are comprehended under the name of nutrition. But when that nutrition is either not performed, or deficiently so, all these aliments become useless, and do not hinder the falling into all the evils which are the consequence of atrophy or inanition. Of all the causes that may hinder nutrition, there is not perhaps a more common one than over-abundant evacuations. Such is the fabric of our machine, and in general of all human machines, that for aliments to acquire the degree of preparation necessary to repair the body, there must remain in it a certain quantity of humors well elaborated, and, if I may use the expression, naturalised to it. If this condition of them is defective, the digestion and coction of the aliments remains imperfect, and so much the more imperfect, as the humor that is needed requires the most elaboration, and is of the most importance.

A healthy robust nurse, from whom the taking some pounds of blood in twenty-four hours, would probably kill, would furnish to her child the same quantity of milk, for four or five days running, without any sensible inconvenience to her, because milk is, of all the humors, that which requires the least elaboration, being, a secretion almost distinct from the humors of the body; whereas blood is an essential of life. There is another humor, the seminal liquid, which has so great an influence over the forces of the body, and over the accomplishment of the digestions which repair them, that the Physicians of all ages have unanimously believed, that the loss of one ounce of this humor weakened more than the loss of forty ounces of blood.

Some idea may be gathered of its importance, from observing the effects which it operates on its first beginning to form itself: the voice, the aspect of the physiognomy, even the lineaments themselves of the face undergo an alteration: the beard appears, the whole body often takes another air, from the muscles acquiring a largeness and firmness that constitute a sensible difference between the body of an adult and, that of a young man who has not passed the season of pubescence. All these developements are stopped or hindered by the loss of the organ which serves for the separation of that liquid which produces them; very just observations having proved, that the amputation of the testicles, even in the age of virility, has occasioned the shedding of the beard, and the return of an infantine voice[3]. After that, can there be any doubt of the power of its action over the whole body? Does not it sensibly give reason for apprehending the multitude of evils which must arise from the waste or profusion of so pretious an humor? Its natural destination determines the only allowable means of its evacuation. Disorders will sometimes occasion its efflux. It may be involuntarily lost through the effect of lascivious dreams. The author of Genesis has left us the history of the crime of Onan, doubtless in order to transmit with it that of his punishment; and we learn from Galen, that Diogenes was guilty of the like pollution.

If the dangerous consequences of the over-abundant loss of this humor depended only on the quantity, or were the same, quantity for quantity, with the other humors, it would not, in a physical light, be of much importance, in which of the above ways the evacuation was made. But the manner or form here is as essential a point, as the substance of the thing itself, if I may be indulged this expression, my subject authorising such licence of language. Too considerable a quantity of the seminal humor, lost in the natural way, brings on very grievous disorders, but which are much worse when the same quantity has been wasted out of the course of nature. Those disorders, which such as exhaust themselves in the natural commerce of the sexes, bring upon themselves, are dreadful; but those are much more so which are produced by self-pollution. It is these last that are properly the objects of this work; but the intimate connexion which they have with the first, hinders the separation of them in the description. It is then the description common to both, that shall form the first Article. This shall be followed by the explanation of the Causes, a second Article, in which I shall state those that render the consequences from self-pollution the most dangerous: The Means of Cure, and Remarks on some Diseases that have an affinity to that cause, shall conclude the Work. I will add throughout, the Observations of the best Authors to those which I have myself made.

ARTICLE I.
The Symptoms.

SECTION I.
Description drawn from the Works of Physicians.

Hippocrates, the most antient and the most exact of all the observers of Nature, has already described the evils produced by excessive venery, under the name of the Dorsal Consumption, in Latin, Tabes dorsalis[4].—“This disease (says he) proceeds from the spinal marrow. It attacks young married folks, or those addicted to lustful excesses. They have no fever, and though they eat as much as usual, they turn lean, and waste away. They imagine they feel something, as it were like ants, descending from the head, and creeping down the back-bone. In their evacuations by stool or urine, they lose abundance of the seminal liquid much thinner than it naturally is. They are unfit for generation, and are often busied in the act of it, in their dreams. Walking, especially in any bad road, soon puts them out of breath, weakens them, brings on heavinesses of head; they have a kind of tingling in their ears; at length an acute fever (lypiria) terminates their days.”

Some Physicians have attributed to the same cause, a disease which Hippocrates describes elsewhere[5], and which has some affinity to the first: this last they call “the secondary tabes dorsalis.” But the continuance under it of the bodily strength, which he particularly specifies, appears to me a convincing proof, that this last disease does not acknowledge the same cause as the first. It seems rather a rheumatic affection. For example, Celsus, in his excellent book on the preservation of health, says, “the pleasures of coition are always pernicious to weak constitutions, and the frequent use of them enfeebles the strong.[6]”

Nothing can be conceived more dreadful than the description which Aretæus has left us of the evils produced by an over-abundant evacuation of that humor. “The young (says he) contract the looks and the infirmities of old age; they become pale, effeminate, torpid, inactive, stupid, and even drivellers; their bodies are bent, their legs refuse their office; they have a general distaste, and grow unfit for all the offices of life; many fall into a palsy[7].” In another place he sets down the pleasures of venery among the six causes that produce the palsy.

Galen has seen the same cause produce diseases of the brain and nerves, and destroy the vital force[8].

He says in another place, that a man who was not thoroughly recovered of a violent disorder, died on the same night that he acquitted himself of the nuptial function with his wife.[9]

Pliny the Naturalist tells us, that Cornelius Gallus, a Prætor advanced in years, and Titus Ætherius, died in the act itself of coition.[10]

“The stomach (says Ætius) is weakened; the transgressor falls into a paleness, leanness, dryness; his eyes are hollowed in his head[11].”

These attestations of the most authoritative among the antients, are confirmed by a crowd among the moderns.

Sanctorius, who has, with the greatest accuracy, examined all the causes that act upon the human body, has observed, that this one weakened the stomach, ruined the digestions, hindered the insensible perspiration, the interruptions or disorders of which are attended with such bad consequences, produced a heat in the liver and kidneys, disposed for the stone, diminished the natural heat, and commonly drew after it a weakness of the eyes[12].

Lommius, in his excellent Commentaries on the passage I have quoted from Celsus, seconds the testimonies of his author, with his own observations. “Too frequent emissions (says he) of the seminal liquid relax, drain, weaken, enervate, and produce a multitude of evils; apoplexies, lethargies, epilepsies, a dozingness, maladies of the eyes, loss of sight, tremors, palsies, convulsions, and of all the kinds of gout, the most painful one[13].”

There is no reading without horror, the description left us by Tulpius, that celebrated Burgomaster and Physician of Amsterdam. “Not only (says he) the spinal marrow wastes away, but both body and mind languish alike; the individual perishes miserably. Samuel Vespretius was attacked with the defluxion of an excessively acrid humor, which first seized the back part of his head and the nape of his neck: thence it passed to the spine, the loins, the haunches, and the joints of the thigh, occasioning to the unhappy patient such acute pains and tortures, that he became totally disfigured, and fell into a slow fever, that kept consuming him, but not so fast as he could have wished, his condition being so intolerable, that he frequently invoked death before it came to his deliverance from his sufferings[14].”

Nothing (says a celebrated Physician of Louvain) so much weakens the vital faculties, and abridges life[15].

Blancard had seen simple gonorrhœas, consumptions, and dropsies all acknowledging this cause[16].

Muys had seen a man as yet unbroken with age, attacked with a spontaneous gangrene in the foot, which he attributed to venereal excesses[17].

The Memoirs of curious Naturalists mention the circumstance of a loss of sight, the observation of which deserves a recital at large. “It is (says the author) unconceivable, what a sympathy the repositories of the seminal humor have with the whole body, but especially with the eyes. Salmuth saw a learned hypochondriac run raving mad, and another man, whose brain was so dried up, that it might be heard shaking as it were loose within the skull; both owing to their having abandoned themselves to excesses of venery. I myself saw a man of fifty-nine years of age, who, three weeks after marriage with a young woman, fell into sudden blindness, and died at the end of four months[18].”

The over-dissipation of the animal spirits weakens the stomach, palls the appetite, and nutrition no longer proceeding in its due course or degree, all the parts languish, and an epilepsy is sometimes the consequence[19].

We cannot, it is true, say that the animal spirits and the seminal humor are the same thing, but observation has taught us, as will be subsequently seen, that these two fluids have a great affinity.

M. Hoffman has seen the most dreadful accidents follow a waste of the seed.

“After a long course of nocturnal pollutions (says he) not only the strength diminishes, the body is emaciated, the face turns pale, but moreover the memory fails, a continual sensation of cold seizes all the limbs, the sight dims, the voice grows hoarse[20]; the whole body insensibly decays; the sleep, disturbed by uneasy dreams, brings with it no refreshment, and one feels pains like those which follow a severe beating[21].”

In his consultation for a young man, who, among other disorders, had brought upon himself a weakness in the eyes, by self-pollution: “I have (says he) seen many examples of persons, who, even in the age of full growth, that is to say, when the body is come to the plenary enjoyment of its vigor, had drawn upon themselves not only a redness and extreme pains in the eyes, but also so great a weakness of the sight, as to be no longer able to read or write. I have even seen two instances of a gutta serena produced by this cause[22].”

It will probably not be unpleasing here, the specifying the history of the disease which gave rise to the consultation precedently quoted.

“A young man having, from the age of fifteen, abandoned himself to the practice of self-pollution, had, by the frequency of that act till the age of twenty-three, brought upon himself such a disorder of the head, and especially such a weakness in the eyes, that they particularly were seized with violent convulsions at the time of the seminal emission. If he attempted to read, he felt a dizziness somewhat like that of drunkenness. The pupilla was extraordinarily dilated. He suffered extreme pains in the eye; his eyelids felt heavy, and glewed up every night; his eyes were always suffused with tears, and in the two corners of them, both very painful, there was constantly gathering a whitish matter. Though he ate his meals chearfully, he was reduced to extreme leanness, and as soon as he had eaten, he would fall into a kind of drunken stupor.”

The same author has preserved to us another observation on a case, of which he himself had been an ocular witness, and which deserves a place here. “A young man about eighteen years of age, having had an over-frequent intercourse with a servant-maid, fell all on a sudden into a great faintness, with a general tremor in all his limbs; his face flushed, and a very weak pulse. He was recovered out of this slate, in about an hour’s time, but he remained under a general languor. The same fit frequently returned, with an intolerable anguish, and in eight days time brought on a contraction and a tumor of the right arm, with a pain at his elbow, which redoubled at every fit. This disorder proceeded for some time augmenting, notwithstanding all the remedies that were used. However, M. Hoffman cured him at length[23].”

M. Boerhaave paints these disorders with that energy and exactness which characterise all his descriptions.

“An excessive profusion (says he) of the seminal humor produces lassitude, feebleness, immobility, convulsions, emaciation, desiccation, pains in the membranes of the brain; it obtunds the senses, and especially the sight; it brings on the tabes dorsalis, a general torpor, and various other diseases which have an affinity to those[24].”

It would not be right here to omit the observations which this great man communicated to his hearers, on his explaining this aphorism to them, and which turn upon the different means of evacuation.

“I have (says he) seen a patient, whose illness began by a languor and weakness all over his body, especially towards the loins; it was accompanied with such a motion of the tendons, such periodical convulsions, and wasting away, as were enough to destroy the whole body: he also felt a pain in the membranes of the brain, a pain which the patients call a dry burning heat, with which the noble parts are, in this case, continually affected.

“I have also seen a young man seized with a tabes dorsalis. He had been an extremely pretty figure, and though he had been often admonished against the over-indulgence of venery, he would still abandon himself to it, and became so deformed before his death, that all that muscular roundness, which appears over the spinal apophyses of the loins, was entirely sunk and flattened. In this case the brain seems to be consumed, and, in fact, the patients become stupid. The body loses all its suppleness to such a degree, that I never saw such immobility produced by any other cause. The eyes also contract a notable dimness, or difficulty of seeing[25].”

M. de Senac, in his first edition of his Essays, set forth the dangers of self-pollution, and denounced to the victims of this infamy all the infirmities of the most languishing old age, in the flower of their youth. In the following editions may be seen his reasons for the suppression of this passage, and of some others.

Mr. Ludwig, in his description of the evils attending over-abundant evacuations, does not forget the seminal one.

“The young (says he) of either sex, who abandon themselves to lasciviousness, ruin their health, by a dissipation of that strength which by nature was designed to bring their body to its greatest point of vigor. In short, they fall into a consumption[26].”

M. de Gorter enters into particulars of the most dreadful accidents deriving from this cause; but as it would be of too great a length to copy him, I refer to his work those who understand the language in which he wrote[27].

M. Van Swieten, after a recital of the above-quoted description of the tabes dorsalis by Hippocrates, adds:

“I have seen all these symptoms, besides many more, befall those who had abandoned themselves to the infamy of self-pollutions. During three years, I employed, in vain, all the aids of the medical art, for a young man, who, by this vile habit, had brought on himself erratic, surprizing, and general pains, with a sensation sometimes of heat, sometimes of a very irksome cold all over his body, but especially towards the loins. These pains having, afterwards, been a little diminished, he felt so great a cold in his thighs and legs, although those parts seemed to the touch to have preserved their natural warmth, that he was continually warming himself at the fire, even during the greatest heats of the summer. But what more particularly astonished me, was a continual motion of rotation in the testicles, and the patient complained grievously of a like motion which he felt in his loins[28].”

This narration does not inform us whether this wretched object terminated his life at the end of the three years, or, what is worse, yet continued to languish on, for some time longer; for there could hardly be a third issue.

M. Kloekoff, in a very good work on those distempers of the mind which depend on the body, confirms, by his observations, what has been here advanced on this subject.

“Too great a dissipation of the seminal humor weakens the springs of action in all the solids; thence arise weakness, laziness, listlessness, hectics, the tabes dorsalis, a torpor, and depravation of the senses, stupidity, madness, epilepsies, convulsions[29].”

M. Hoffman had already remarked, that young people who abandoned themselves to that shameful practice of self-pollution, “lost, little by little, the faculties of the understanding, especially the memory, and became intirely unapt for study[30].”

M. Lewis describes all these evils: but I shall only transcribe from his work, what relates to the detriment occasioned to the intellectual faculties.

“All the evils which arise from excesses committed with women, are also effected in early life, by that abominable practice in school-boys, a practice which I cannot describe in terms odious enough, pollutio sui, which, actuated more by vitiousness than by sense and reason, and ignorant of the mischievous consequences, they repeat, &c. &c.[31] ... So intimately are the mind and body blended together, that there cannot be any disease of the one which will not influence the other; but in none is the mind more deeply affected than in this. To add to his infelicity, a melancholy gloom attends the patient, and silence and solitude are anxiously sought after.—The chearful haunts of men no longer delight him; he is absent in company, and will have no part of the conversation. He is not happy even in his friend: a sense of his misfortune, and perhaps the aggravating circumstance of having brought it upon himself, for ever hang on his mind. The company of the female sex he loves indeed, but the apprehensions that he may be cut off from nuptial felicity, interrupts the fruition of their pleasing converse. Thus deeply dejected, he excludes himself from society, wanders in retirement, and it is well if he seeks not to destroy himself at last[32].”

Fresh observations, subsequently introduced, will confirm the truth of the preceding dreadful description. That one furnished by M. Storcke, in the valuable work which he has published on the history and cure of diseases, is not less terrible: but I refer the curious to the work itself, which no physician would wish to be without. The passage I allude to is in his Medicus annuus, T. ii. p. 215, &c. But before I terminate this Section, I shall here conclusively add a passage in that excellent work, with which M. Gaubius has lately enriched the medical art. He not only paints the evils, but points out the causes of them, with that force, that truth, that sagacity, that exactness, which can belong to none but so great a master. It is a most valuable extract; and that the coloring of it may appear in its true lustre, I subjoin to the translation the original of it, in the language of the author’s expression.

“An immoderate profusion of seed is pernicious, not only through the waste of that most useful humor, but also through the over-frequent repetition of that convulsive motion which is produced by the emission. For the highest pitch of that pleasure is immediately succeeded by so universal a relaxation of the animal strength, as cannot be borne often without a consequential enervity. The more frequent a draught there is on the secretory ducts of the body, the greater is the derivation of the respective humors of the secretions; so that in the case of the liquid being repeatedly attracted to the parts of generation, the rest of the secretions are depauperated: thence, from excesses of venery follow, weariness, weakness, immobility, a tottering gait, pains of the head, convulsions, a hebetation of all the senses, and especially of the sight, blindness, intellectual imbecillity, a feverish circulation, dryness, leanness, a phthisis, a tabes dorsalis, an effeminate habit of body. These evils are liable to augment and become incurable through that perpetual pruriency for venery which the mind does not less than the body at length contract; and from which it follows, that obscene imaginations haunt even the dreams of persons so affected, and that the parts prone to the libidinous turgescence are, on every occasion, impetuously sollicited, while the quantity of the repaired seminal fluid, were it never so small, occasions constantly a troublesome stimulation, and is ready to start from its relaxed repositories with any the least endeavour, or even without any endeavor at all. Whence it is clear why an excess of this nature is so capable of blasting the flower of youth[33].”

SECTION II.
Observations communicated.

I shall preserve no other order than that of the dates of my receiving these observations.

“I have (says my illustrious friend M. Zimmermann,) seen a man of twenty-three years of age, who became epileptic, after having weakened himself by frequent self-pollutions. As often as he had nocturnal pollutions, he fell into a complete fit of epilepsy. The same thing happened to him after any commission of that act, from which however he would not abstain, notwithstanding those consequences, and all the admonitions against it. Having, however, abstained from it for some time, I cured him of the nocturnal pollutions, and had even hopes of removing his epilepsy, of which the fits were already gone off. He had recovered his strength, his stomach, his sleep, and a very good color, after having looked like a corpse. But being returned to his acts of self-pollution, which were always followed by an attack of the epilepsy, he came at length to be taken with fits in the street, and he was found one morning dead in his chamber, fallen out of his bed, and bathed in his own blood.”

May I be allowed one question, which occurred to me when I read this observation? It is this: Can such as blow their brain out with a pistol, who drown themselves in a river, or cut their own throats, be accounted more guilty of self-murther than this man?

My friend adds, without entering into particulars, that he knows another who is in the same case: I have since learnt, that he ended his days in the same manner.

“I knew (says Mr. Zimmermann) a man of great genius, and of almost universal knowledge, whom frequent pollutions had reduced to lose all the activity of his understanding, and whose body was exactly in the condition of the patient that consulted Boerhaave[34].”

Of this case I shall hereafter take notice.

I owe the two following facts to M. Rast, junior, an eminent Physician of Lions, with whom I had the pleasure of passing some months at Montpelier.

A young man at Montpelier, a student of physic, perished by his excesses in the practice of self-pollution. His imagination was so horror-struck, that he died in a sort of despair, fancying that he saw hell open, on the side of him, to receive him.

A child of that town, not above six or seven years old, taught, I believe, by a servant-maid, practised it so frequently; that a hectic fever coming on, soon cut him off. His fury of passion for this act was so great, that there was no hindering him to the very last days of his life. When it was represented to him that he was hastening his death, his comfort, he said, was, that he should the sooner rejoin his father, who was dead a few months before.

M. Mieg, a celebrated physician of Basil, well known in the literary world by some excellent dissertations, and to whom his country is obliged for his introduction of inoculation, of which he continues the practice with great ability and equal success, has communicated to me a letter of the Professor Stehelin, a name ever dear to literature, in which I have found many interesting and useful observations. Some I reserve for properer places in the course of this work. Here I shall but subjoin two instances.

The son of M. ——, aged about fourteen or fifteen years, died of convulsions, and a kind of epilepsy, of which the original cause was self-pollution. In vain was he attended by the most experienced physicians of the town.

I also know a young lady of twelve or thirteen years old, who by this execrable practice has drawn upon herself a consumption, together with a timpanous abdomen, the fluor albus, and an incontinence of urine. Though medicines have alleviated her complaints, she is still but in a languishing condition, and I dread fatal consequences.

SECTION III.
Descriptions taken from the book intitled Onania.

Since the publication of this work, I have learnt, from a very respectable quarter, that an entire faith ought not to be given to the English collection, and that this reason, together with certain calumnies, some obscenities, and the forgery of an imperial privilege, had made the German translation be prohibited in the Empire. These motives would have determined me to suppress all that I had extracted from that work, but some considerations have induced me to preserve it, under the modification of this præ-advertisement. The first is, that some of these reasons concern only the German edition. Another is, that though there may be some facts invented, as indeed some of them plainly enough appear to carry with them a stamp of falsity, it is yet proved, that the greatest number of them are but too true. In short, a third consideration which determined me, is what I find in the above-mentioned letter of M. Stehelin. “I have (says he) received a letter from M. Hoffman of Maestrich, in which he acquaints me of his having seen a practiser of self-pollution, who had already drawn on himself a tabes dorsalis, which he had, without success, attempted to cure, and the patient was afterwards cured by the remedies of the Onania, of which Dr. Beckers of London is supposeably the author, and so well cured, that he has recovered his corpulence, is strong and healthy, and has four children.”

The English book of Onania is a perfect chaos, and the most indigested work that has been produced a long time. It is only the observations that can bear reading. All the reflections of the author, whom I could not believe a physician, are nothing but theological or moral trivialisms. I shall not extract from all this work, which is rather of the longest, any thing but a description of the most common accidents, of which the patients complain. The vivacity, the pathetic expressions of pain and repentance, which are found in a few of the letters in that book, I omit in this extract; but the want of them ought not to weaken the impression of horror which the reading of the facts themselves should inspire, as it is on the facts that the impression depends; and the readers will rather have to thank me for sparing him the perusal of a much greater number of others, without order or diction. I shall class under six heads those evils of which the English patients complain, and begin with the most grievous, those of the soul.

First. All the intellectual faculties are weakened; the memory fails; the ideas are confused or clouded; the patients sometimes even fall into a slight degree of insanity; they are continually under a kind of inward restlessness, and feel a constant anguish, with such pangs of confidence and remorse, as make them shed tears in bitterness of heart. They are subject to giddiness; all the senses, and especially those of seeing and hearing, grow weaker and weaker; their sleep, if sleep they can, is disturbed by disagreeable or frightful dreams.

2. The bodily strength entirely fails; the growth of those who have not done growing, and who abandon themselves to this detestable practice, is considerably checked. Some can get no sleep at all, others are in a state of continual dozing. All of them almost become hypochondriacs, or hysteric, and are overwhelmed with all the evils that attend those dreadful disorders; melancholy, sighs, tears, palpitations; suffocations, fainting fits. Some have been known to spit calcarious matter. Coughs, a slow fever, consumptions, are the punishments which some find in their own crimes.

3. The most acute pains are another subject of complaint in the patients. One complains of his head, another of his breast, the stomach, the intestines, aches of external rheumatisms; some are affected with an obtuse sensation of pain in all the parts of the body, on the slightest impression.

4. There are not only to be seen pimples on the face, which is one of the commonest symptoms, but even blotches, or suppurative pustules, on the face, nose, breast, thighs, with cruel itchings on those parts. Nay, one patient complained of fleshy excrescences on his forehead.

5. The organs of generation come in also for their share of the sufferings, of which they are themselves the primary cause. Many patients become incapable of erection; in others, the seminal humor comes away in the moment of the slightest stimulation, and of the weakest erection; some will even evacuate it on going to stool. Numbers are attacked with an habitual gonorrhœa, which intirely destroys constitutional vigor, and the matter of it resembles a fetid sanies, or foul mucosity. Others are tormented with painful priapisms. Dysuries, stranguries, heat of urine, a weakening of its spirt, put the patients to cruel inconveniences and pains. Some have very painful tumors in the testicles, in the penis, the bladder, the spermatic string. In short, either the impossibility of coition, or the depravation of the seminal humor, renders incapable of procreation almost all those who have long abandoned themselves to this crime.

6. The functions of the intestines are sometimes totally disordered, and some patients complain of an obstinate costiveness, others of the piles, or of the running of a fetid matter from the fundament.

This last observation reminds me of a young man, who, after every act of self-pollution, was attacked with a diarrhœa, which must be an additional cause of a diminution of strength to him.

SECTION IV.
The Author’s Observations.

The object of description occurring in my first observation is dreadful; I was myself frighted at the first time of my seeing the unfortunate sufferer, who is the subject of it. Then it was that I felt, more than I had ever before done, the necessity of pointing put to young people, all the horrors of that precipice down which they voluntarily cast themselves.

L. D——, a watchmaker, had been clear of vice, and enjoyed a good state of health, till the age of seventeen, when he gave himself up to self-pollution, which he repeated every day, and often thrice a day, when the ejaculation was always preceded and accompanied by a slight fainting fit, or privation of the senses, and a convulsive motion of the exterior muscles of the head, which drew it strongly backward, while his neck swelled prodigiously. There had not passed a whole year, before he began to feel a great weakness after each act: this warning was not sufficient to draw him out of the mire. His soul, wholly ingrossed by the filth of this obscenity, was no longer capable of any other ideas, and the reiterations of his crime became every day more frequent, till he found himself in a condition, that gave him apprehensions of death. Sensible of his danger too late, the mischief had made too great a progress to admit of a cure. The parts of generation were become so irritable, and so weak, that there did not need any fresh act on the part of that wretched object, to make them let go the seed. The slightest irritation procured, instantly, an imperfect erection, which was immediately followed by an evacuation of that liquid, and this daily augmented his weakness. That convulsion, which before he was not used to experience but just at the time of the consummation of the act, and which ceased at the same time, was become habitual, and often attacked him without any apparent cause, with such violence too, that during the time of the fit, which sometimes lasted fifteen hours, and never less than eight, he suffered, in the nape of his neck, such violent pains, that commonly his outcries sounded like piteous howlings, and it was impossible for him, while the fit lasted, to swallow any thing whatever, liquid or solid. He had contracted a hoarseness of voice, but I did not observe it more so out of the fit than in it. He totally lost his strength. Incapable of every thing, overwhelmed with misery, he languished, almost without any assistence, for some months; being the more to be pitied, for that some remains of memory, which however it was not long till that was abolished, only served constantly to recall to him the causes of his wretchedness, and to augment to him the horrors of remorse. I was told his condition. I went to him, and found him less a living creature than a cadaverous figure, lying upon straw, meagre, pale, sallow, sending forth an infectious smell, and himself almost incapable of any motion. He bled at the nose a pale and watery blood, and was continually foaming at the mouth: attacked too with a diarrhœa, his excrements came from him without his perceiving it; the flux of his seed was continual; his eyes bleared, dim, or extinguished, had lost their faculty of motion; his pulse was extremely low, yet quick and frequent; his breathing very laborious, his leanness excessive, except just in his feet, which began to be œdematous. The disorder of his mind was not less than that of his body; without ideas, without memory, without reflections, without anxiety about his fate, without any other sensation but that of a pain which returned with every fit, at least once in three days. A being much below that of a brute; a sight, of which there is no conception can reach the horror. It was not easy to make out that he had ever belonged to the human species. I procured for him quickly enough the relief of destroying those violent convulsive fits, which recalled him to the power of feeling, only by the pain they brought with them; but satisfied with having mitigated his tortures, I discontinued remedies, which could have no efficacy on the main of his disorder. He died at the end of a few weeks, in June, 1757, œdematous all over his body.

Not all those who give themselves up to this odious and criminal habit, are, it is true, so severely punished; but there are none that do not suffer for it in a less or greater degree. The frequency of the act, the difference of constitutions, many adventitious circumstances, may occasion considerable differences.

The pernicious consequences that have fallen under my observation, are, first, a total disorder of the stomach, which in some discovers itself by loss of appetite, or by a depravation or irregularity of its cravings; in others, by acute pains, especially in the time of digestion, by habitual nauseas or vomitings, which resist all remedies, while the cause, the bad practice, is continued. Secondly, A weakening of the organs of respiration, whence frequently result dry husky coughs, almost always a hoarseness, a failure of voice, and a shortness of breath, on any little violence of motion. Thirdly, A total relaxation of the nervous system.

It does not require a very deep knowledge of the animal œconomy, to be sensible that the three prementioned causes are capable of producing all the diseases of languor, and experience every day proves their producing them. The first ill consequences of them, to such as are guilty of self-pollution, besides those I have just pointed out, are a considerable diminution of strength, a less or greater paleness, sometimes a slight but continual jaundice, often pimples, which come and disappear only to make room for fresh ones, and are constantly reproducing themselves all over the face, but especially in the forehead, the temples, and about the nose; a notable leanness; an astonishing sensibility to the changes of weather, especially to cold; a languor in the eyes, a weakening of the sight, a great impairment of the faculties, especially of the memory.

“I am sensible (a patient writes me) that this wretched practice has diminished the strength of my intellectual faculties, and especially of my memory[35].”

I beg leave to insert here the fragments of some letters, which, combined together, will form a complete enough description of the natural disorders produced by self-pollution. The language in which I wrote (the Latin) hindered me from making use of them in the first edition of this work.

“I had the misfortune (says the same person, who was by this time arrived at the age of maturity,) like too many other young people, to suffer myself to be carried away by the violence of a habit, as pernicious for the body as for the soul. Age, indeed, assisted by reason, has, for some time past, corrected this wretched inclination: but the ill is done. The disorder and extraordinary sensibility of the nervous system, and the accidents resulting therefrom, are accompanied with a weakness, a restlessness, a tædium vitæ, a sense of distress, that all seem to vie with each other to afflict me. I am consumed by an almost continued loss of seed. My face is become as it were cadaverous, so pale, so livid. The weakness of my body renders all my motions laborious: that of my legs is often so great, that they can hardly support me, and that I dare not go out of my room. My digestions are so ill performed, that my aliments come from me, scarcely more altered, three or four hours after I have taken them, than when I took them into my stomach. My breast gets stuffed with phlegm, the load of which throws me into a state of anguish, and my expectorations into a state of faintness. Here you have a succinct account of my causes of complaint, which are still aggravated by the melancholic certainty I have acquired, that every day will yet be worse than the precedent ones. In a word, I cannot conceive that a human creature can be afflicted with greater evils than I am. Without the particular grace of Providence, I could hardly bear up under so heavy a load.”

It was not without shuddering that I red, in another patient’s letter, the following terrible expressions, which reminded me of some in the (English) treatise of Onania.

“If religion did not restrain me, I should have already put an end to a life, which is so much the more miserable for its being my own fault that it is so.”

There cannot surely be in the world a more intolerable condition than that of anguish: a state of pain is nothing in comparison with it; and when it is superadded to a croud of other evils, it is not at all strange that the sufferer should wish for death as his greatest good, and regard life as a real misfortune, if the name of life can be given to so deplorable a state.

Vivere cum nequeam, sit mihi posse mori;

Dulce mori miseris, sed mors optata recedit.

M.

The following description is less long, and not quite so terrible as the first one.

“I had the misfortune, in my tenderest youth, being, to the best of my remembrance, not above eight or ten years of age, to contract that pernicious habit of self-pollution, which very early ruined my constitution; but especially, for some years past, I find myself under an extraordinary oppression: my nerves are extremely weak, my hands without strength, always shaking, and in a perpetual sweat. I have violent pains in my stomach, arms, legs, sometimes in my loins, and in my breast. I am often troubled with a cough; my eyes are always weak and dim; I have a devouring appetite, and yet I grow very lean, and never but look extremely ill.”

In the Section on the method of cure, will be seen the success of the remedies in this case.

“Nature herself (says a third correspondent) opened my eyes to the cause of that languor under which I found myself, and to the danger of that abyss into which I was precipitating myself. Pimples or eruptions on the part which was the instrument of my crime, and the faintness I felt in the midst of the act itself, left me no room to doubt of the cause of my suffering.”

I might add here a great number of cases of this nature, on which I have been consulted since the second edition of this work, but they would be useless repetitions. I shall only confine myself to two or three of the most recent.

A man in the flower of his age wrote to me, but the other day, in the following terms.

“In my early youth I contracted a most dreadful habit, which has ruined my health. I am overwhelmed with stoppages and giddinesses of my head, which give me room to apprehend an apoplexy. I have been bled for them; but those who advised me, are sensible they were in the wrong of it. I have a contraction of my breast, and consequently a difficulty of breathing. I have frequently pains of the stomach, and I suffer successively almost all over my body. In the day-time I am heavy, inclined to doze, and restless; in the night my sleep is disturbed and agitated, and does not refresh or repair me. I have often itchings; I am pale, my eyes are weak and sore, my complexion is jaundiced, and I have an offensive breath, &c.”

Another writes me thus: “I cannot walk two hundred paces without resting. My weakness is extreme. I have continual pains all over my body, but especially in my shoulders. I preserve my appetite, but that is rather a misfortune to me, as I have pains of the stomach the moment I have eaten, and throw up whatever I have got down. If I read a page or two, my eyes water, and are sore. I often sigh involuntarily. Filo xylino flaccidius veretrum, omnisque erectionis impotens, semen quidem, manu sollicitum effluere sinit, nequaquam vero ejaculat, adeo cæterum imminutum et retractum, ut oculi de sexu vix judicare possint.”

The particulars of this case, with the success of my method of treatment of it, will appear, in their place, in this work; and I furnish them with the more reason, for that he was the most weakened and the most governable of any patient I have seen.

A third, who had abandoned himself to this detestable practice, at the age of twelve years, appeared to have suffered even more in his intellectual faculties than in his bodily health. To the following purpose was the account of himself: “I feel (says he) my warmth sensibly diminish. My sensations are considerably dulled; the fire of my imagination greatly slackened; the sense of my existence infinitely less quick; every thing that passes at present before me appears to me like a dream; I have difficulty of conception, and less presence of mind; in short, I feel I am perishing, though I preserve my sleep, my appetite, and am not much altered in my looks.”

A consequence, and not a rare one, of this practice, is the Hypochondrialgia, and if those who are Hypochondriacs, from other causes, abandon themselves to it, all the symptoms of that disorder are exasperated by it, and it becomes incurable. I have seen the most cruel inquietude, agitations, anxieties result from these two causes united; and repeated observations have proved to me, that, in those Hypochondriacs, who are subject sometimes to attacks of delirium, or frenzy, self-pollution always hastens on the fits. The brain, weakened by this double cause, successively loses its faculties, and the patients fall at length into a state of an idiotism, which is never interrupted but by some attacks of madness.

The Memoirs of curious Naturalists mention a melancholic man, who, in pursuance of Horace’s advice, used, sometimes, to seek in wine, a diversion from his melancholy, and who, in the honey-moon of his second marriage, having indulged excessively the pleasures of coition, fell into so dreadful a frenzy, that it was necessary to chain him down[36].

Jakin, in his Commentaries upon Rhazes, has preserved to us the history of a melancholic man, whom excesses of that kind threw into a consumption, attended with a frenzy, which made an end of him in a few days[37].

It is well known that the epileptical paroxysms, accompanied with an effusion of the seminal liquid, leave a greater faintness and stupor than other fits, without that symptom. Coition will provoke and bring on the fits of that disorder, in those who are subject to it; and it is to this cause that M. Van Swieten imputes the great faintness into which those fall, who have frequent returns of those fits[38]. The late M. Didier knew a merchant of Montpelier, who never performed the act of coition without having immediately after it an attack of the epilepsy[39]. Galen makes the like observation[40]. The Observations of Henricus ab Heers, not to mention many others, attest the like effect[41].

M. Van Swieten knew an epileptic patient, who was attacked with a fit on his wedding night[42].

M. Hoffman knew a woman, who was very lewd, and who, for the most part, had a fit of the epilepsy after every act of venery[43].

And here it may not be improper to introduce what M. Boerhaave says, in his treatise on the Disorders of the Nerves, that in the venereal ardor, all the nerves are affected, sometimes even to death. He mentions the example of a woman, who, after every coition, fell constantly into a pretty long fainting fit; and that of a man, who died in the act of his first coition, the force of the spasm having instantaneously thrown him into a total palsy. And I find in the excellent work with which M. de Sauvages has lately inriched the physical world, a most singular, and perhaps before unheard of, case of a man, who, in the midst of the act used to be attacked (and this disorder lasted twelve years) with a spasm, which threw his whole body into a state of rigescence, with loss of sense: Ita ut illum præ oneris impotentia in alteram lecti partem excutere cogeretur uxor, ut evacuatio spermatis lenta flaccidoque veretro demum succedebat, remittente corporis rigiditate[44].

I know several cases which have some affinity to this. M. de Haller has specified a great many, in his remarks on the Institutes of Boerhaave[45]; and there are numbers to be seen in the works of other observers.

It has precedently been remarked, that self-pollution would produce this dreadful disorder, and that happens oftener than is imagined: Can it then be surprizing, that the acts of it should recall the fits, as I have more than once seen it in persons subject to the epilepsy; or is it strange that they should render it incurable?

This total rigescence or inflexibility of the body, of which M. Boerhaave makes mention, is one of the most uncommon symptoms; I never saw it above once, but then it was in the most consummate degree. The ill had begun by a stiffness of the neck and spine, and successively spread to all the limbs: this was the case of an unfortunate young man, whom I saw some time before his death. Uncapable of lying on the bed in any other posture but the supine one, and without power to move hand or foot, immoveable, in short, and reduced to receive no aliments but as they were put into his mouth; he languished a few weeks in this deplorable condition, and died, or rather went out like a taper, almost without any indication of pain.

I have since seen another terrible example of this total and mortal rigescence, which will deserve a specification here.

On the 10th of February, 1760, I was called to visit, in the country, a man of about forty years of age, who had been very strong and robust, but who had been guilty of great excesses with women and wine, and who had moreover often exercised himself at trials of bodily strength. It was some months precedently that his disorder had begun by a weakness in his legs which made him stagger as he walked, as if he had been drunk. Sometimes he would actually fall down, though on the plainest ground. He could not descend any steps without a great deal of trouble, and hardly durst stir out of his apartment. His hands shook terribly; it was with much difficulty he could write a few words, and those sadly scrawled. But he could dictate readily enough, though his tongue, which had never had any great volubility, began to have rather somewhat less. His memory was good, and the only thing that could make any detriment to his intellects to be suspected, was, that he was less attentive to the game of draughts, and that his countenance was a good deal altered. He had an appetite, and slept; but it was with difficulty he could turn himself in his bed.

It appeared to me, that his excesses with women and wine were the primary cause of his disorder, and I judged, that his straining in his trials of bodily strength might be the reason why his muscles were more particularly attacked. The season was rather unfavorable to the employment of remedies, and yet it was requisite, in the mean while, to stop the progress of the disease. I advised him frictions of the whole body, with flannel, and other corroboratives; proposing to myself to augment the doses with the adjunction of the cold-bath, in the beginning of the summer. At the end of some weeks the tremors of his hand appeared some what abated. In the month of April there was a conciliation held on him, in which his disorder was imputed to an accident of his having, about two years before, written, for some months, in a room newly plaistered and damp. Upon this there were applied warm baths, unctuous frictions, powders said to be diaphoretic and antispasmodic; but no alteration for the better followed. In the month of June, a second consultation decided for his going to the baths of Leuk, in Valais: he went, and on his return he had more tremors, and a greater stiffness. Since then (September, 1760) till the month of January 1764, I have not seen him above three or four times.

In 1762, on the credit of some advertisement, he sent for, from Frankfort, the medicines of the Onania, which did him no service. Last year, he took others from some foreign physician, but with as little success. His disorder had, from the beginning, made slow but daily advances, and many months before his death, he could no longer support himself on his legs, nor could he so much as move his hands or arms. The embarrassment of his tongue increased, and his voice failed him to such a degree, that there was no hearing easily what he said. The extensor muscles of the head let it continually fall on the breast. He had constantly an uneasiness in his back: his sleep and appetite successively diminished: the last months of his life he could hardly swallow any thing. Since Christmas an oppression came on him, with an irregular fever. His eyes grew dim in a singular manner. When I saw him again in the month of January, he used to pass the whole day, and a great part of the night, in an elbow-chair, leaning backward, his feet extended on a chair, his head falling down every instant on his breast, having always a person standing near him, and constantly employed in changing his attitude, lifting his head up to feed him, to give him snuff, to blow his nose; and to make out, by listening attentively, what he said. The last days of his life he was reduced to pronounce his words letter by letter, which were taken down in writing just as he could articulate them. Finding that I gave him no hopes, and that I only employed some lenitives for his oppression and fever, urged, at length, by a desire of living, he opened himself in, confidence to one of his friends, for his immediately acquainting me of it, as the cause to which he imputed all his illness, and which was his self-pollution, having begun that infamous practice many years ago, and continued it as long as he could; adding, that he had felt this disorder increase in proportion to his delivering himself up to it. This confession he confirmed to me some days afterward, and withal, that it was on this account that he had been determined to send for the medicines of the Onania.

Excess of venery does not only produce the languors of chronical diseases, but sometimes throws into acute ones, and always aggravates any disorders that proceed from other causes; it easily produces malignancies, which, in my opinion, are but a failure of the forces of nature.

Hippocrates, in his histories of epidemical diseases, has, of old, left us his observation on a young man, who, after excesses of wine and venery, was seized with a fever, accompanied by the most vexatious and irregular symptoms, and which proved mortal[46].

All that M. Hoffman says on this head deserves a reference to it. After having spoke of the danger of the pleasures of love, for wounded persons, he examines that of such as, having a fever, will nevertheless venture upon them. He begins by quoting an observation of Fabricius Hildanus, who says, that a man having had a commerce with a woman, the tenth day of a pleurisy, which had had a favourable crisis from a profuse sweat, was attacked with a violent fever and remarkable tremors, and died the thirteenth day. He gives you afterwards the history of a man of fifty years of age, gouty, and much addicted to venery and wine, who, in the first days of his recovery from a false pleurisy, was attacked, immediately after a coition, with a general tremor, an excessive flushing in the face, a fever, and all the symptoms of the disorder from which he was recovering, but much more violent than the first time, and was in a much greater danger. He tells you too of a man, who never indulged any venereal excesses without having, for many days afterwards, fits of an intermittent fever. He concludes with a case from Bartholinus, who saw a new-married man attacked, on the next morning of his wedding night, after conjugal excesses, with an acute fever, a great lowness of spirits, faintnesses, nauseas of the stomach, an immoderate thirst, lightness of head, want of sleep, and anxieties; but who was cured by rest and some restoratives[47].

M. Chesneau saw a young married couple, attacked, the first week of their wedding, with a violent continual fever, with a flushing in the face, which was also considerably swelled: both of them had a great pain in the small of their back, and both perished in a few days[48].

M. Vandermonde describes a fever produced by the same cause, a very tedious fever, and attended with the most dreadful symptoms, but of which the issue was more happy than in the case adduced by Hippocrates. I will not here recite the description of it, because of its length; but I earnestly recommend to physicians the reading it in the work itself, which is now easily to be come at any where. I shall subsequently and in another place speak of the method of cure.

M. de Sauvages describes this disorder under the title of the burning fever of the exhausted: the pulse is sometimes strong and full, at others weak and low. The urines are red, the skin dry and hot, the thirst considerable. They have nauseas, and cannot sleep[49].

In 1761 and 1762 I saw two young men both very healthy, very strong, and vigorous, who were attacked, the one on the next morning the other on the next night of their respective weddings, with a violent fever, without any shudder, their pulse quick and hard, lightness of head, many slight convulsive motions, an intolerable restlessness, and the skin very dry. The second was extremely thirsty, and made water with great difficulty. I imagined, at first, that an excess of wine might have some share in these accidents, but I was fully convinced to the contrary, at least by the second. They were both of them cured in about two days time, a circumstance, which, joined to the epoch of their disorder, and to its symptoms, leaves no doubt about the cause of it.

Careful observations and sad experience have taught me, that acute disorders were always very dangerous in persons accustomed to self-pollution; their progress is commonly irregular, their symptoms unaccountable, their periods interverted. The constitution affords no resources; Art is obliged to do every thing, and as it never procures perfect Crises, when, after a great deal of pains, the disease is got under, the patient remains rather in a state of languor than of recovery, which exacts a continuation of the most assiduous care, to hinder him from falling into some chronical disorder.

I find that Fonseca has already stated this danger. “Many young persons (says he) and those very robust ones, are either attacked, after excesses with women, on the same night, with an acute fever that kills them, or fall into grievous disorders, of which they find it a difficult matter to be cured; for when the body is weakened by venereal excesses, if it should be attacked with an acute distemper, there is no remedy[50].”

A young lad, not quite sixteen, had abandoned himself to self-pollution, with such a rage, that, at length, instead of seed, he only brought blood, of which the emission was soon followed by excessive pains, and by an inflammation of all the organs of generation. Happening to be in the country, I was consulted. I ordered extremely emollient cataplasms, which produced the effect I expected from them: but I have since learnt, that he died soon after of the small-pox; and do not in the least doubt of the hurt he did his constitution by the fury of that infamous practice, having much contributed to render that distemper mortal. What a warning should not this be to young people!

All those who have sometimes occasion to have the venereal disorder under their cure, know that it frequently becomes mortal, in such as have had their constitution impaired or worn out by frequency of debauchery. I have seen the most deplorable objects in that way.

SECTION V.
Consequences of self-pollution to the female sex.

The preceding observations appear, all of them (except that from Mr. Stehelin, which concludes the second Section,) to concern principally the men: but it would be an essential imperfection, in a treatise on this subject, to omit an admonition to the female sex, of their exposing themselves to the same dangers, on their pursuing the same depraved course. There are numerous examples of their having drawn upon themselves all the evils I have set forth, and women but too often perish miserably the victims of this detestable lewdness. The English treatise upon Onania is full of confessions of this kind, which there is no reading without being seized with horror and compassion; the malignity of the disorders occasioned by it, seems even to have a superior degree of activity among the women, to what it has among the men.

Besides the symptoms which I have already described, the women are particularly exposed to hysteric fits, or dreadful vaporous affections; to incurable jaundices, to cruel cramps of the stomach and back; to sharp prickings of the nose, to the fluor albus, of which the acridity is a perpetual source of the most torturous pains; to the procidentia, and ulcerations of the womb, and to all the infirmities which are the consequences of these two disorders; to elongations of the clitoris, and eruptions on it; to the furor uterinus, which, depriving them at once of modesty and reason, puts them on a level with the most lascivious brutes, till a desperate death delivers them from pain and infamy.

The face, that faithful mirror of the intellectual and bodily affections, is the first to give outward signs of the inward disorders. Then that plumpness, that fresh color, whose union constitutes that air of youth, which alone can supply the place of beauty, and without which beauty itself can produce no other impression than that of a cold unconcerned admiration; that plumpness, I say, that fresh color, are the first to fade away and disappear: leanness, a sallow complexion, a coarseness of the skin succeed immediately to them; the eyes lose their lustre, tarnish, and express, in their languor, that of the whole machine, the lips lose their vermilion, the teeth their whiteness; in short, it is not rare that the whole figure receives a considerable damage by the total deformation of the shape.

The Rickets is a disorder, as to which Boerhaave is mistaken, when he says, it does not attack persons after the age of three years. It is not uncommon to see young people of both sexes, but especially the female, who, after their having been well-shaped to the age of eight, ten, twelve, or fourteen, and even sixteen years, fall, little by little, into a distortion of shape, through the curvature of the spine; and this disorder sometimes becomes very considerable. It is not here the place for entering into particulars of this ailment, nor into an enumeration of the causes which produce it. Hippocrates has pointed out two[51]. I shall have, perhaps, occasion of communicating, in another work, what several observations have taught me on that subject; but what I ought not to omit here, is, that self-pollution holds the first rank among the causes that produce it.

M. Hoffman having already observed, that young persons, who give themselves up to the pleasures of venery before they have attained their full growth, could not thrive, and must rather go back than advance in their stature[52], I only add, that it is obvious to sense, that a cause which can hinder growth, must, a fortiori, disturb the order, and produce those irregularities in the course of it, which contribute to the disorders of which I am treating.

One symptom common to both sexes, and which I place under this head, because it is the most frequent among women, is that indifference which this infamous habit leaves for the lawful pleasures of the marriage-bed, even while the desires of sensuality, and strength are not yet extinguished; an indifference, which does not only attach numbers to a single life, but which often pursues even to the nuptial couch.

In the collection of cases made by Dr. Beckers, a woman confesses, that this vile habit had got such an ascendant over her senses, that she had an aversion against the lawful means of satisfying the desires of nature, in the natural way.

I myself know a man, who being taught these abominations by his tutor, had the like distaste, on the first of his marriage; and his anguish at this situation, joined to the faintness contracted by that habit, threw him into a profound melancholy, which yielded, however, at length, to the nervous and restorative remedies.

Here, before I proceed farther, let me entreat fathers and mothers to make their own reflections on the occasion of the misfortune of this last mentioned patient; and there are more examples than one of the like case. If one may, to such a degree, be deceived in the choice of those to whom the important care of forming the head and heart of young persons, what ought one not to fear from those, who, being only designed to give the corporal graces and talents of education, are less scrupulously examined as to their morals? And what ought not one still more to fear from servants, too often hired without any character of their morals at all.

The young boy, or rather merely a child, of whom I made mention from M. Rast, was, as has been remarked, seduced into that vice by a maid-servant.

The English collection of cases of self-pollution is full of the like examples; and I could produce many instances of young plants blasted and lost through the villainy of the gardeners intrusted with their cultivation: and, in that light, there are such gardeners of both sexes.

What remedy, will it be said, is there for such evils? The answer is out of my sphere; I shall then make it a short one. The most scrupulous attention ought to be given to the choice of a preceptor; nor ought the care to end at that, but a watchful eye be kept over him and his pupil; that sort of watchful eye, which belongs to a sensible and careful father of a family, and which discovers the most hidden doings in every corner of the house; that eye, I say, which discovers those antlers of the stag, which escaped all other eyes, a penetrative vigilance, in short, from which nothing can be concealed, and which it is possible to have, when one is in earnest in it.

Docuit enim fabula Dominum videre plurimum in rebus suis.

Phæd.

Young persons ought never to be left alone with masters liable to any suspicion; and all intercourse should be forbidden with the servants.

It is not long since that a girl of about eighteen years of age, who had enjoyed a very good health, fell into an astonishing weakness; her strength decayed daily; she was all the day stupified with a kind of dozing, and all night tormented with a want of sleep, her appetite was gone, and œdematous swellings spread over her whole body. She consulted an able surgeon, who, having satisfied himself of there having been no disorder in the menstrual flux, suspected self-pollution. The effect of his first question confirmed to him the justness of his suspicion, and the confession of the patient converted it to a certainty. He made her sensible of the danger of this practice, a cessation of which, and some remedies, stopped, in a few days, the progress of the evil, and even produced some amendment of health.

Besides self-pollution, manual or instrumental, there is another defilement, or contamination, which may be termed clitoridian, of which the known origin is traced up to the second Sappho.

Lesbiades, infamem quæ me fecistis, amatæ.

A vice too common among the Roman women, from that epoch at which the general dissoluteness of morals began, and which was more than once the object of the epigrams and satires of those times.

Lenonum ancillas posita Laufella corona

Provocat, et tollit pendentis præmia coxæ.

Ipsa Medullina frictum crissantis adorat.

Palmam inter Dominas virtus natalibus æquat.[53]

Nature, in her sportive indulgence to variety, gives to some women a degree of resemblance to men, which, for want of sufficient examination, has, for ages, obtained a belief of that chimæra of Hermaphrodites. The supernatural size of a part which is commonly a very small one of the female organ of generation, and upon which M. Tronchin has given a learned dissertation, constitutes the whole wonder, as the odious abuse of that part does the whole ill. Vain, perhaps, of this sort of resemblance, there have been some of these imperfect women, who have usurped the functions of virility. The Greeks call them Tribades. They are a sort of monstrous beings too frequent, and which seduce the young of the fair sex with the more facility, for their having in their favor, that reason for loving eunuchs, which Juvenal imputes to some women,

Quod abortivo non est opus.

There are not those consequences to be dreaded, the impossibility of hiding which betrays such as have had complaisances or weaknesses in the natural way. Of this circumstance the Tribad takes the advantage to draw the young of her sex into the crime, without her innocent accomplices even suspecting the danger: and yet it is not less in that way than in other means of pollutions; the consequences are equally pernicious. All these deviations from the course of nature lead to weaknesses, languor, pain, and death. This last kind of lewdness deserves the more attention, for that it is, in our days, grown frequent, and that it would not be difficult to find more than one Laufella, more than one Medullina, who, like those Roman heroines in obscenity, think they should slight those extraordinary gifts of nature, if they did not pervert them to the confusion of the arbitrary distinction of the sex to which they were born. It is well known, that, some years ago, at a certain court, a lady was so much in love with a young girl to her taste, that she conceived a violent jealousy against a celebrated man of Literature, who had conceived a liking for her.

But it is time to have done with these melancholic instances of the depravity and turpitude of human nature; I am mortified and sick of describing them. I will not here then accumulate a greater number of facts: those which remain for me to specify, will naturally find their place elsewhere. I shall next pass to an examination of the causes of the evils proceeding from this practice, after first concluding this Section with the following general observation.

It is this. Young people born with a weak constitution, have, on a parity of crimes, much worse consequences to fear, than those who are naturally vigorous. None escape punishment, but all do not experience it equally severe. Those especially who have reason to apprehend any hereditary diseases by the father’s or the mother’s side; such as are threatened with the gout, the stone, the consumption, the king’s evil; those who have any touches of a cough, of an asthma, of spitting of blood, of head-achs, of the epilepsy; those who have any tendency to that kind of rickets which I have precedently mentioned; all these unfortunates, I say, ought to be intimately persuaded, that every act of this sort of debauchery gives a severe blow to his constitution, most certainly hastens the attack of the evils they dread, renders the fits infinitely more vexatious, and will throw them, in the flower of their youth, into all the infirmities of the most languishing old age.

Tartareas vivum constat inire vias.

ARTICLE II.
The Causes.

SECTION VI.
Importance of the seminal liquid.

How comes it that an over-abundant emission of seed produces all the evils I have precedently described? This is what I am actually proceeding to examine. These causes may be reduced to two, to wit,

The privation of that liquid.

The circumstances accompanying the emission.

An anatomical particularisation of the organs of this secretion; the conjectures, more or less probable, on the process of nature in that secretion; with observations on its sensible qualities, would be so many points of discussion misplaced here. To prove the utility of that liquid to the human constitution, is all that is essential to the purposes of this work; and this is to be done by the testimonies of the most eminent physicians, including withal a determination of its effects on the body.

The following Section will be appropriated to an examination of the effects which are produced by the circumstances that accompany the emission.

It was the opinion of Hippocrates, that the seed was a secretion from the whole body, but especially from the head. “The human seed (says he) proceeds from all the humors of the body, and is the most essential part of them. This is proved by the weakness, the faintness, which accompanies the loss of it in the act of coition, be the quantity never so small. There are veins and nerves, which, from all the parts in the body, concur to their centre in the parts of generation; when these are turgid, and genially heated, there is felt in them a stimulation, or pruriency, which communicating itself to the whole body, carries with it an impression of pleasure and glowing warmth; the humors enter into a kind of fermentation, which separates from them all that is the most precious and balsamic in them; and this part separated from the rest, is carried, by means of the spinal marrow, to the organs of generation[54].”

Galen adopts his ideas. “This humor” (says he) “is but the most subtile, the most refined part of all the others. It has its proper veins and nerves, which carries it from the whole body, to the seminal repositories, the testicles[55].”

In another place, he says: “The loss of the seed is at the same time attended with a loss of vital spirit, so that it is no wonder that over-frequent coition should enervate the constitution, since it deprives the body of its purest essence[56].”

The same author has preserved to us, in his History of Philosophy, the opinions of several philosophers on this subject. May I be allowed to recite them here?

Aristotle, whose works of natural philosophy will be in esteem as long as the value of observations shall be known, with a just allowance at once for the merit and the difficulty of opening the career of them, calls it “the excretion of the ultimate aliment, (which, in terms more clear, signifies the most perfectly elaborated part of our aliments) endowed with the faculty of reproducing bodies in the likeness of that whereby it was itself produced.”

Pythagoras calls it, “the flower, or quintessence of the purest blood.”

Alcmæon, his disciple, a great naturalist and an eminent physician, one of the first that discovered the importance of dissecting animals, and of all the heathen philosophers, he that appears to have had the truest ideas of the nature of the soul, Alcmæon, I say, calls the seed “a portion of the brain.”

Plato termed it, “an emanation from the spinal marrow.”

Democritus thought of it as Hippocrates and Galen.

Epicure, that respectable character, who better knew than any one, that it was pleasure alone that constituted the happiness of man, but who at the same time fixed the nature of those pleasures by such rules as the Christian Hero would not disown, or object to them: yes, Epicure, whose doctrine has been so cruelly disfigured and blackened by the Stoics, that those who knew nothing of him but through the chanel of their information, have suffered themselves to be misled by it in their opinion, to such a degree, that they have mistaken for a libertine, a debauchee, a man, “who (as M. Fenelon observes) was of an exemplary continency, and whose morals were extremely regular.” To which I shall add, that his principles are the most severe censure on the tenets of his pretended modern sectaries, who knowing nothing of him but his name, most basely and unworthily misuse it, by employing it to authorise systems of infamy, which he would abhor, and by which those men of probity and sense, who love the truth, ought not to permit his memory to be dishonoured, if so it was that men, themselves lost to honour, could dishonour any one. Epicure, I say, looked on the seed as a particle of the soul and the body, and grounded, upon this idea, his precepts for the chary preservation of it.

Though many of these opinions differ in some measure, they all agree to prove how precious this humor was held.

It has been a question whether it has any analogy to any other humor? Or is it the same with that liquid, which, under the name of the animal spirits, conveyed by the nerves, concurs to all the functions of the animal machine that are of any, though ever so little importance, and of which the depravation produces such an infinity of evils, so frequent and so unaccountable? To answer this question positively, it would be requisite first to know intimately the nature of these two humors; and we are very far from having as yet reached that degree of knowledge: we can at best propose nothing more than ingenious and probable conjectures.

Hoffman says, “It is easy enough to conceive how there is such a close alliance between the brain and the testicles, since both those organs separate from the blood the most subtile and the most exquisite lymph, destined to give force and motion to the parts, and even to have an influence on the functions of the soul. So that it is not possible but that an over-abundant dissipation of these liquids should destroy the strength of the mind and body[57].”

Elsewhere he says, “That the seminal liquid is like the animal spirits, which are separated from the brain, distributed through all the nerves of the body, and seems to be of the same nature; whence it comes, that the more of it is dissipated, the less there is secreted of the animal spirits.”

M. de Gorter is in the same idea. “The seed (says he) is the most perfect, the most importantly essential of all the animal liquids: it is also the most elaborate; it is the result of all the digestions; its intimate connection with the animal spirits, proves that, like them, it draws its origin from the most perfect humors[58].”

In short, it appears by these testimonies, and by a croud of others which it would be superfluous to quote, that it is a liquid of the utmost importance; that it might be called the essential oil of the animal liquids; or, perhaps more correctly, the spiritus rector, the dissipation of which leaves the other humors weak, and, in some measure, dead or vapid.

But whatever may be the original importance of this humor, it may be objected, that since it is separated from the others, and deposited in its appropriate reservoirs, of what use can it be to the body after this its separation? It is granted, they will say, that an over-abundant evacuation of those humors, which are in actual circulation through the vessels, and by that very circulation contribute to nutrition, such as the blood, the serosity, the lymph, &c. may weaken; but it is not so easy to conceive how a humor, that is no longer in circulation, that is, in a state of separation, can produce this effect.

I answer, in the first place, that examples of this kind, and too frequent not to be generally known, ought to obviate such an objection. Who might not have observed, that an evacuation of milk (to go no further than that instance) though moderate and of no long duration, is capable of weakening a nurse that has not a strong constitution, to such a degree, that she may feel the influences of it for the rest of her life? And even the robustest would sink under it, if continued beyond a certain length of time. The reason is sensibly apparent. Upon evacuating too often the reservoirs appropriated to the reception of any liquid, the humors are, by a necessary consequence of the laws of the animal machine, determined to an afflux thither in the greater abundance. This secretion becomes excessive, all the others suffer by it, and especially nutrition, which is but a kind of secretion; the animal constitution falls into languor and debility.

Secondly, There is an answer, relative to the seed which does not hold as to the milk, which is only a liquid simply nutritious, of which an over-abundant secretion does no detriment, but in so much as it diminishes the quantity of humors: whereas the seed is an active liquid, of which the presence produces effects necessary to the play of the organs, which ceases on its evacuation; a liquid, of which, for that very reason, the superfluous emission is detrimental, in a double view. This requires explanation.

There are humors, such as those of the sweat and perspiration, which leave the body as soon as they are separated from the other humors, and thrown out by the vessels of circulation.

There are others, such as the urine, which, after this separation and expulsion, are retained, for a certain time, in reservoirs appropriated for that purpose, and out of which they are not discharged, but when they are in a quantity great enough to excite, in those reservoirs, an irritation that mechanically forces them to void them.

There is a third sort of humors, which, like the second, are separated and retained in their respective reservoirs, not for the purpose of being, at least intirely, evacuated, but to acquire, in those reservoirs, a perfection that renders them fit for new, or other functions, when they return into the mass of humors. Such, among others, is the seminal liquid. Separated in the testicles, it passes thence, by a duct of some length, into the seminal vesicules, and being constantly repumped by the absorbent vessels, it is, successively, by little intervals, returned into the total mass of the humors. This is a truth demonstrable by many proofs. One alone may suffice. In a healthy man, the secretion of this liquid is continually formed in the testicles: it flows into these reservatories of which the capaciousness is very limited, not perhaps great enough for what is separated in one day; and yet there are men so continent as not to evacuate any for whole years. What would become of it, if it was not continually disposed of, by its re-entry through the vessels of circulation? A re-entry, that is extremely facilitated by the structure of all the organs that serve for the separation, the conveyance, and the preservation of this humor. The veins are there much more considerable than the arteries, and that in such a proportion as is observed no where else[59]. It is probable then that this resorption is not only made in the seminal vesicules, but that it has already taken place in the testicles, in the epididymises, which are a kind of first reservatory appendant to the testicles, and in the vasa deferentia, or chanel by which the seed is conveyed from the testicles to the seminal vesicules.

It was not unknown to Galen that the humors were inriched by the retained seed, though he was not apprized of the mechanism.

“Every thing (says he) is full of it, with those who abstain from venery; but there is none of it to be found with those who abandon themselves to excesses of that sensuality.”

He then labors hard to discover why a small quantity of that liquid can give so much strength to the body; at length he decides, “that it has an exquisite virtue, so that it can with surprising quickness communicate its energy to all parts of the body[60].”

He proves afterwards, by various examples, that a small cause often produces great effects, and at length concludes thus: “Needs it be any wonder that the testicles furnish a liquid of a nature to diffuse fresh vigor over the whole body, when the brain produces motion and sensation, and the heart gives pulse to the arteries!”

I shall wind up this Section with what one of the greatest men of the age (M. Haller) says on the seminal humor.

“The seed is kept in the seminal vesicules till the man makes use of it, or that nocturnal pollutions deprive him of it. During all that time, the quantity there is of it excites the animal system to the venereal act; but the greatest quantity of this seed, the most volatile, the most odorous, that which has the most strength, is repumped into the blood, and produces, at its entrance into it, the most surprising changes; the beard, the hair, calluses; it alters the voice and manner: for it is not age that produces in animals this change; it is the seed alone that operates them, and they are never remarked in eunuchs[61].”

How does the seed operate these effects? Ay, that is a problem of which the solution is not perhaps as yet mature. But this however may, with great probability, be said, that this liquid is a stimulative, a goad, that irritates the parts with which it is in contact: its strong odor, and the palpable irritation it exercises on the organs of generation, leave, as to that, no doubt; nor is it unconceivable that these acrid particles, being continually resorbed and removed with the humors, should, slightly at least, but continually, stimulate the vessels, which, by that very means, contract themselves with the more force; their action upon the fluids is then the more efficacious, the circulation the more animated, the more lively, the nutrition the more exact, and all the other functions executed in the more perfect manner for it: whereas, when this aid is denied or failed, several functions never display themselves, or take place, which is the case in eunuchs[62]; and all are defectively performed, and the worse for that want.

Here then occurs a natural enough question; it is this: How comes it that Eunuchs are not afflicted with the same evils as those who exhaust themselves by excesses of venery?

It is hardly possible to answer this question, satisfactorily, till the end of the following Section.

SECTION VII.
An examination of the circumstances which accompany the emission.

There are several evacuations which are performed imperceptibly: all the others, except one, are effected in a state of perfect health, with a facility to which it is owing that they have no influence over the rest of the machine: the slightest motion of the organ which contains the matter of them, suffices for the expulsion. The excepted one is the evacuation of the seed, towards which nothing less is required than a general commotion, a convulsion of all the parts, an augmentation of quickness in the course of all the humors, to dislodge and give it issue.

Can it be thought here too hazardous a conjecture to look on this necessary concurrence of the whole animal system, as a sensible proof of the influence it has over the whole body?

“Coition (says Democritus) is a sort of epilepsy.”

“It is (says M. Haller) a most violent action, bordering upon convulsion, and which must therefore astonishingly weaken, being detrimental to the nervous system.”

It has been seen, in an observation precedently set forth, that an emission was preceded by actual convulsions, by a sort of epilepsy; and the same observation furnishes evident proof of the influence which those violent emotions had on the unhappy man who was subjected to them.

The immediateness of the faintness after the act has to many appeared, and not without reason, a proof, that it could not be only the privation of the seed that occasioned it; but what demonstratively proves how much the spasm or convulsion must weaken, is the weakness incident to those who are afflicted with convulsive disorders: that which follows the fits of epilepsy is sometimes excessive.

It could be only to the spasm, or convulsion, that the singular effect was to be imputed, which coition had on one whose name was Amman, and whose history was preserved to us by Platerus. Being advanced in years he had re-married, and being about to consummate his nuptials, he was seized with so violent a suffocation, that he was obliged to discontinue the attempt. The same accident returned every time that he renewed the trial. He applied, upon this, to a number of quacks. One of them, who had made him take a great many of his pretended remedies, assured him that he had no longer any danger to fear. On the faith of his Æsculapius, he ventured upon a fresh attempt. The same symptom was instantly the consequence: however, full of confidence, he would persist, and died in the act itself, in the arms of his wife[63].

Those violent palpitations which sometimes accompany that of coition, are also a convulsive symptom. Hippocrates speaks of a young man, to whom excesses of venery and wine had occasioned, among other symptoms, continual palpitations[64]. And Dolæus knew one, who, in the act itself, was seized with so violent a palpitation, that he must have been suffocated if he had persisted[65].

The case of the child, above quoted, is also a proof, (which did not escape the sagacity of M. Rast,) of the power of the convulsive cause; since at that age he could hardly evacuate any thing but the humor of the prostates, and not genuine seed.

These remarks have fallen under the observation of a number of good authors, who have written upon this matter. Galen seems to have hit upon them, where he says, “Pleasure itself weakens the vital forces.”

Mr. Fleming has not omitted the cause, in his fine poem on the maladies of the nerves:

Quin etiam nervos frangit quæcunque voluptas[66].

Sanctorius positively establishes his assertion, that the motions weaken more than the emission of the seed: and it is surprising that M. de Gorter, his commentator, should have sought to persuade the contrary. The reason which he gives, in his averment that these motions do not weaken any more than any other motion, “because they are not convulsive,”[67] will persuade no one. One example, could he produce it, would not pass for a law of nature. Lister, Noguez, Quincy, who had commented this work before him, are not of his opinion; they attribute part of the danger to the weakness that remains after the convulsions. “Coition (says Noguez) is itself a convulsion; it disposes the nerves to convulsive motions, and the slightest occasion consequently produces them.”

J. A. Borelli, one of the first creators of physiology, had not looked upon them in the same light as M. Gorter. He is clearly positive upon this article.

“This act (says he) is accompanied with a sort of convulsive pathos, which carries with it the most sensible affections of the brain, and of the whole nervous system[68].”

Mr. Senac specifically imputes to the nerves the weakness which follows coition.

“The most likely cause (says he) of the fainting fit which comes when an abscess breaks in the interior of the abdomen, is the action of the nerves then brought into play. This is confirmed by the ejection, or by the fits of faintness which follow the effusion of seed; for it is only to the nerves that this sinking can be imputed[69].”

M. Lewis[70] attributes more to this cause than to the other, in which he is of the opinion of Sanctorius. Where there is convulsion, the nervous system is in a state of tension, or, to say more correctly, in an extraordinary degree of action, of which the necessary consequence is an excessive relaxation. Every organ, that has been wound up beyond its natural pitch, falls beneath it; and from that very fall must necessarily result a bad performance of the functions which depend on it; and as the nerves have an influence over them all, there is not one of the functions but what must be more or less disordered when the nerves are weakened.

One reason, too, that may contribute to the weakness of the nervous system, is the augmentation of the quantity of blood in the brain, during the venereal act; an augmentation well demonstrated, and which has gone sometimes so far as to produce an apoplexy. Many examples of it are furnished by observing practitioners, and Hoffman relates one of a soldier, who, in the rage of lust with which he abandoned himself to this act, died apoplectic in the very instant of fruition. On being opened, the brain was found full of blood. It is by this augmentation of blood, that the reason is explained of those excesses producing madness[71]. Such a quantity of blood distending the nerves, enfeebles them: they can the less resist impressions, and thence their weakness.

On a reflection upon these two causes, the evacuation of the seed, and the concomitancy of the convulsive motions, it is easy to explain the disorder that must result from the excess of them to the animal œconomy. They may be ranged under three heads.

The depravation of the digestions.

The weakening of the brain and of the nervous system.

The disordering of the perspiration.

We shall see that there is no chronical disease that may not be deduced from this triple cause.

“The relaxation proceeding from these excesses, disorders the functions of all the organs,” says one of the authors who has written the most sensibly on the dietetic branch of physic; and the digestion, the concoction, the perspiration, and the other evacuations become respectively faulty: thence results a sensible diminution of strength, of memory, and even of the understanding; a dimness of the eye-sight, all the disaffections of the nerves, all kinds of the gout and rheumatism, an amazing weakness of the back, the consumption, a feebleness of the organs of generation, bloody urines, head-achs, and a multitude of other disorders superfluous to specify here; in short, nothing so much abridges life as the abuse of the pleasures of venery[72].

The stomach is the part the first affected by all the causes of weakness: this is owing to its being the part of which the functions require the greatest perfection in the organ. The others are, for the most part of them, as much passive as active; the stomach is almost intirely active; so that as soon as its strength diminishes, its functions grow disordered; an observable truth, which combined with the variety of the first impressions, often vexatious ones, produced upon this instrument of digestion by what is taken in at the mouth, combined too, I say, with the immediately following observation, will account for the frequency, the oddity, the obstinacy of its ailments. It is of all the parts of the body that which receives the greatest number of nerves, and in which therefore, by that very means, there must be distributed the greatest quantity of animal spirits. Whatever then weakens the action of the one, and diminishes the quantity or depraves the quality of the other, must in course more diminish the strength of the stomach than of any other intestine; and this is what happens in excesses of venery. The importance of the function to which it is destinated, is the cause, that when it is ill or deficiently performed, all the others feel it, and are the worse for it.

Hujus enim validus firmat tenor omnia membra;

At contra, ejusdem franguntur cuncta dolore.[73]

From the moment that the digestions are imperfectly performed, the humors assume a character of crudity, which disqualifies them for all their destinations, but which, above all, hinders nutrition, upon which depends the reparation of the vital forces. To be assured of the general influence of the stomach, there needs only to observe the state of a person under the complaint of a laborious digestion; his strength fails in a few minutes; a general uneasiness renders that weakness still harder to be indured; the organs of sensation grow obtuse; the soul itself cannot exercise its faculties but imperfectly; the memory, and especially the imagination, seem annihilated; nothing, in short, makes a man of sense so nearly resemble a fool, as a painful or defective digestion.

A very curious observation, specified by M. Payva, a Portuguese physician, who resided in Rome, throws a great light on the prodigious weakness into which an excessive indulgence of venery will throw those who are guilty of it.

“When (says he) the desires of the sensual joy are, in young people, risen to the greatest height, they feel a kind of agreeable sensation at the orifice of the stomach; but if they satisfy these desires with too great an impetuosity, and beyond their strength, they feel, in the same place, an extremely disgustful sensation, with something of a bitterness in it they cannot express; they pay dearly besides for their excesses, by the leanness and marasmus, &c. into which they fall[74].”

Aretæus had, before him, taken notice of this truth[75], and Boerhaave employs the same expressions as Payva, with this addition, that that sense of pain goes off in proportion as they recover their strength[76]. He informs, in another place, the same thing, joining thereto a very useful practical rule, which is, that on the coming on of epileptic fits, after venereal excesses, care should be taken to strengthen the nerves of the stomach[77].

Secondly, The weakness of the nervous system, which disposes to all the paralytic and spasmodic accidents, is produced, as I have before observed, by the convulsive motions which accompany the emission, and, in the second place, by the disorder of the digestions: when these are faulty, the nerves suffer by it, and suffer the more, for that the fluid with which they are imbibed, being the very ultimate elaboration of coction, and that which requires the greatest perfection of that elaboration; when, I say, that coction is faulty, it is of all the animal fluids that which is thereby the most sensibly affected, and upon which the crudity of the rest of the humors has the most influence. In short, what augments this weakness, is an evacuation of a humor that has great affinity to the animal spirits, and which, by reason of that affinity, cannot be evacuated without diminishing the strength of the nervous system, which I cannot help attributing to those spirits, notwithstanding the modest doubts of some great men, who dare not affirm any thing, in natural philosophy, the truth of which does not fall under the senses, and notwithstanding the objections of some subaltern or systematical physiologists.

Besides: independently of the damage resulting from this evacuation, relatively to the quantity of the animal spirits, it hurts, by its depriving the vessels of that gentle stimulation produced by the absorbed seed, and which contributes so much to the coction of those spirits. It is pernicious, then, both by its drawing off a part of the animal spirits, or, at least, of a very pretious humor, and by diminishing the coction, without which those spirits can, at best, be only imperfectly and insufficiently prepared.

There is between the diseases of the stomach to those of the nerves, and from those of the nerves again to those of the stomach, a vitious circle. The first beget the second, and these, once formed, contribute infinitely to augment them. If daily observation were not to prove it, the bare anatomical inspection of the stomach would carry sufficient conviction with it. The quantity of nerves distributed through it, is abundantly a demonstration how necessary they are to its functions, and how, consequently, those functions must be disordered when the nerves are not in good condition.

Thirdly, Perspiration does not proceed kindly in that case. Sanctorius has even determined the quantity diminished by it; and this evacuation, the most considerable of all the others, cannot be suppressed without there resulting from it a croud of different symptoms.

It is easily then conceivable that there can be no disorder which may not be produced by this triple cause. I will not enter into the explanation of all the particular symptoms; such a particularization would too much expand this little work, and could not interest the physicians to whom it would be superfluous. What M. de Gorter has said upon it, is worth consulting[78].

M. Clifton Wintringham has very sensibly particularised the dangers of this evacuation with respect to the gouty, and his explanation merits attention[79].

The late M. Gunzius, snatched from the medical career in the flower of his age, has given a very ingenious mechanical explanation[80] of the inconveniences resulting from this excess to the faculty of respiration. He speaks, on this occasion, of a man who had thereby brought upon himself a continual cough; a symptom which I myself observed in a young man who died a victim of self-pollution.

He was come to Montpelier, to pursue there his studies. His excesses in that infamous practice had thrown him into a consumption, and I recollect that his cough was so strong and so continual, that it disturbed all his neighbours. He was frequently blooded, which must have been, I supposed, by way of making the quicker dispatch of his sufferings. A consultation on his case, prescribed his going home, and living there upon turtle-broth. His residence was, if I am not mistaken, in Dauphiny. The persons consulted promised him a complete cure; but he died two hours after the consultation. How curious an one! and what physicians must they have been who were consulted!

But what is the least easy to conceive, or rather, what is beyond all comprehension, is, that of its prodigious weakening of the faculties of the soul.

The solution of this problem is connected with the question undeterminable by us, of the mutual influence of the two substances upon each other, upon which we are reduced to the observation of these phenomenons, without being able to account for them. We are ignorant of the nature both of the spirit and of the body; but we know that they are so intimately united, that all the changes that the one undergoes are felt by the other: a circulation a little more or less quick, the blood a little more or less thick, some ounces more or less of aliments, the same quantity of one aliment rather than of another, a dish of coffee instead of a glass of wine, a sleep more or less long or tranquil, a stool a little more or less copious, a perspiration too profuse or too languid, will totally change our manner of seeing or judging of objects: From one hour to another, the revolutions of the machine bring with them different sensations, different thoughts, and, arbitrarily, form to us new principles of vices and of virtues; so just is the idea of the poet who first wrote Satires in France.

Tout, suivant l’intellect, change d’ordre et de rang:

Ainsi, c’est la nature et l’humeur des personnes,

Et non la qualité, qui rend les choses bonnes,

C’est un mal bien etrange au cerveau des humains.[81]

So exact is the description which Lucretius has furnished of this intimate union:

——Gigni pariter cum corpore, et una

Crescere sentimus, pariterq; senescere mentem.

Nam velut infirmo pueri teneroque vagantur

Corpore; sic animi sequitur sententia tenuis:

Inde ubi robustis adolevit viribus ætas,

Consilium quoque majus, et auctior est animi vis:

Post ubi jam validis quassatu’st viribus ævi

Corpus; et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus.