Part 11

The patient of whom I particularised the case in the fifth Section, where I promised an account of my method of management of his disorder, lived for three months upon nothing but milk, upon bread well-baked, upon one or two quite new laid eggs, a day, and fair water, just drawn from the fountain. His milk he took four times a day, twice warm from the cow without bread, twice warmed on the fire with some bread. The remedies were an electuary composed of bark, of conserve of orange-peel, and syrup of mint. His breast was covered with an aromatic strengthening plaister. His whole body was every morning rubbed down with flannel. He took as much exercise as he could bear, both on horseback and foot, and especially he kept much in the open air. His weakness, and his complaints of his breast, hindered me from advising him the cold bath at that epoch. The success, however, of the remedies was such, that his strength returned to him, and his stomach was restored. In a month’s time he was able to walk a league on foot. His vomitings ceased intirely; the pains of his breast were considerably diminished, and for these three years last past he continues in a very tolerable state of health. Little by little he returned to his usual aliments, having taken a distaste to milk.

The parts of generation are always those that recover their vigor the slowest. Often too they never regain it, even though the rest of the body appear to have recovered its natural strength. In this case, it may be literally prophesied, that the part which has sinned, will be the part that shall die.

I have always found more facility in curing those who, in the age of maturity, had exhausted themselves by excesses, in a short time, than those who, in a longer space of it, had enervated themselves by pollutions, more rarely practised, but which having been begun in their tenderest youth, had hindered their growth, and had never allowed them to come to all their natural strength. The first may be considered as having had a violent illness, which has consumed all their strength, but whose organs having acquired all their perfection, however they may have much suffered, yet, the cessation of the cause of their illness, time, a good regimen, and proper remedies, may restore them. Whereas the others, having never let their constitution come to good, how should they be restored to what they never had? How could they expect that art should operate in the age of maturity, what they have hindered nature from operating in the tender season of youth and of puberty? Common sense must tell one how chimerical such a hope must be; and, indeed, my observations every day prove to me, that young persons, who have delivered themselves up to this pollution, in their childhood, in their earliest youth, and in the epoch of the unfolding of puberty, an epoch which is a crisis of Nature, for which its whole strength is necessary to her; daily observation, I say, proves to me, that such young persons must never expect to be vigorous and robust: they may think themselves very well off, if they can compass the enjoying a moderate state of health, exempt from great disorders or great pains.

Those who trust to a tardy repentance, having delayed it to an age, in which the machine may preserve itself, when it is in good order, but is not to be repaired without great difficulty, ought not either to have great hopes. After forty it is rare to grow young again.

When I order the bark with wine, I do not restrict the patient intirely to a milk diet; but make him take the bark in the morning and the milk at night. For some patients, however, I have been obliged to invert that order; the wine taken in the morning not agreeing with their stomach, and constantly making them vomit.

When I employ mineral waters, I make them drink first some bottles pure, before I proceed to have them mixed with milk.

When the disorder is inveterate it commonly degenerates into a _cacochymia_, a general depravation of the humors, or ill habit of the body; the cure of which must be proceeded upon before you attempt to restore strength. In this case it is that evacuants are sometimes indispensably necessary, and prove of great service. Whereas restoratives, nutritious aliments, milk, ordered in these circumstances, may throw the patient into a slow fever, and he will rather find his strength diminish in proportion to the use he makes of them.

When violent excesses shall have thrown one suddenly into such a considerable weakness as to give room of fear for the patient’s life, recourse should be had to active cordials. Spanish wines may be given him with a little bread, or some good broths with new laid eggs: he should be put to bed directly, and have some flannels applied to his breast, steeped in wine, warmed with Theriaca.

As to those cases, in which venereal excesses have occasioned an acute fever, bleeding should not be used, unless indicated by the fullness and hardness of the pulse; and it is better to take the quantity of blood at two different times bleeding, than all at once. The white decoction, barley water with a little milk, some doses of nitre, some glisters with a decoction of mullein flowers, some warm bathings for the feet; and as to aliments, some veal-broth, thickened with barley or the like grain; these are the remedies indicated by right practice, and such as I have seen succeed very happily and quickly, in those cases in which I have employed them.

The symptoms rarely require any particular method of cure, and yield to the general one. You may sometimes, however, join external corroboratives to the internal ones, where it may be proper to strengthen any particular part. I have myself often advised, with success, epithems or aromatic plaisters for the breast. Nor is it sometimes unserviceable to wrap the testicles in a soft flannel, steeped in some corroborative liquid, and to support them by means of a suspensory.

Here also may be placed what M. GOTTER says: “I have sometimes cured the _gutta serena_, occasioned by venereal excesses, by employing internal corroboratives, and errhines, or nasal cephalic powders, which, by the slight irritation they produced, determined a greater afflux of the animal spirits to the optic nerve[129].”

It would be needless here to enter on greater particularities of the method of cure; whatever extension I might give them, they would never be sufficient to guide the sick without the assistence of a physician, to whom they would be superfluous. I have, indeed, treated the more largely of the regimen, because that, when the disorder has as yet made no great progress, that alone, joined to the cessation of the cause, might operate a cure, and that any one might confine himself to it without any danger.

There appears then nothing more for me to say, before I terminate this part, but to add the preservative cautions. I was sensible that this article was wanting to the first edition of this work, and that it was an unjustifiable defect, from the importance of the matter. A gentleman, celebrated in the Republic of Literature for his works, and yet more respectable for his talents, his knowledge, and his personal qualities, than for his name, and for the employments of which he so worthily acquits himself, in one of the first towns in Switzerland, M. ISELIN, (I hope he will forgive my naming him,) made me sensible of that my omission in a very polite manner. I shall quote here an extract of his letter with the more pleasure, for its pointing out exactly what there remained for me to do.

“I could wish (says he) to see a work from your hand, in which you would explain the means the most secure and the least dangerous, by which parents, during the time of education, and young persons, when they are left to their own conduct, might the best preserve themselves from that violence of desires which urges them to those excesses, whence arise such dreadful diseases, or to disorders that disturb the happiness of society and their own. I do not doubt of there being a diet that particularly favors continency. I should think that a work that should teach it us, combined with a description of the diseases produced by impurity, would be equivalent to the best treatises of morality on this subject.”

M. ISELIN is doubtless in the right; nothing would be more important than the combination of the two points he desires; but then nothing would be more difficult than the detaching them from the other parts not only of moral but medicinal education. To treat of this article apart, that is to say, to treat of it well, it would be necessary to establish a great number of principles, which would swell too much this little work, and which would, besides, be very foreign to it. Some general precepts, unconnected with the necessary principles and divisions, would not only be of little use, but might even become dangerous; so that it is better to refer such a treatise to the making part of a more considerable one, upon the means of forming a good constitution, and of giving a youth a firmly established health; a matter which, though it has been handled by very able authors, is, hitherto, far, very far from being exhausted; and upon which there remain a multitude of extremely important things to be added, as well as upon the disorders incident to that season of life. So that, though it be against my inclination, I will not here touch upon this article. All that I can say is, that idleness, inactivity, too long lying a-bed, too soft a bed, a rich, aromatic, salt, or vinous diet, dangerous or suspicious acquaintance, licentious works, being the likeliest causes of seduction into those excesses, they cannot be too carefully avoided. Diet especially is of extreme importance, and there is not attention enough had to that particular. Those who educate youth, ought to have ever present to them that pathetic observation of St. JEROM: “The forges of Vulcan, the internals of the Vesuvius and the Mount Olympus do not burn with more flames, than youth pampered with high meats, and drenched with wines.”

MENJOT, one of LEWIS the XIVth’s Physicians, from about the middle to the end of the last century, mentions women, that an excess of _hippocras_ (spiced wine) threw into a venereal extasy. The use of wine and flesh-meats is so much the more pernicious, for that while they augment the force of the stimulations of loose desires, they weaken at the same time that of reason, which ought to resist them. “Wine and animal food dull the soul,” says PLUTARCH, in his treatise _On the eating of flesh-meats_, a work which ought to be generally perused. The most ancient Physicians had already known the influence of regimen over the morals; they had the idea of a moral medicinal-course; and GALEN has left us upon that matter a small work, which is, perhaps, the best upon that subject hitherto extant. Conviction of the reality of his promise cannot but follow its perusal.

“Let those (says he) who deny that the difference of aliments can render some temperate, others dissolute; some chaste, others incontinent; some courageous, others cowardly; some meek, others quarrelsome; some modest, others overbearing; let those, I say, who deny this truth, come to me; let them follow my counsels as to eating and drinking, and I promise them, that they will find great helps therefrom towards moral philosophy; they will especially feel the faculties of their soul gather greater strength; they will improve their natural genius, they will acquire more memory, more prudence, more diligence. I will also tell them what kind of liquors, what winds, what state of the air, what climates they ought to shun or chuse[130].”

HIPPOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, PLUTARCH, had already left us some very good things on this important matter, and among the works which remain to us of the Pythagorean PORPHYRY, that zealous anti-christian of the third century, there is one, _upon the abstinence of the animal food_, in which he reproaches FIRMUS CASTRICIUS, to whom he addresses it, for his having quitted the vegetable diet, though he himself had owned it was the fittest to preserve health, and to facilitate the study of philosophy; and he adds, “Since you have taken to the eating of flesh-meat, your own experience has taught you, that that confession of yours was well grounded.” There are some very good things in that work.

The most efficacious preservative, the most infallible one is, doubtless, that which is pointed out by that great man, who, of all men has the best known his fellow creatures, and all their ways; who has not only seen what they actually are, but what they have been, what they ought to be, and what they are capable of becoming; who has the most truly loved them; who has made the greatest efforts in their favor, and who has been the most cruelly persecuted by them. “Watch with care (says he) over the young man. Do not leave him alone either by day or by night. Sleep, at least, in the same room with him. From the instant that he shall have contracted that habit, the most fatal one that a young man can inslave himself to, he will carry to the grave the melancholic effects of it. He will have his body and his heart for ever enervated by it.” I refer to the work itself for a perusal of all the excellent things he has said on this matter[131].

The description of the danger, upon the abandoning one’s self to such vitious practices, is perhaps one of the most powerful motives of correcting one’s self of them: it is a dreadful picture, and fit to make one start back with horror and affright. Let us assemble in one point of view the principal features of it. A general wasting of the whole machine; an enfeeblement of all the corporal senses and of all the faculties of the soul; loss of imagination and memory; imbecillity; contempt; shame; the ignominy such viciousness drags after it; all the functions of life disturbed, suspended, or painfully executed; long, vexatious, unaccountable, disgustful diseases; acute and constantly regenerating pains; all the infirmities or evils of old age, in the age of youth and vigor; an unaptitude for all those occupations for which man is born; the vile character to act of being an useless burthen to the earth; the mortifications to which such a character is daily exposed; a distaste for all worthy pleasures; a dull melancholy; an aversion for society and consequently for one’s self; a horror of life, the dread of temptations every moment to suicide; an anguish worse than pain; a remorse worse than anguish, a remorse which daily increasing, and which doubtless taking a new force, when the soul is no longer weakened by its ties to the body, will perhaps serve for a torment to all eternity, for an unextinguishable fire. See here the sketch of the fate reserved for those who proceed as if they had not it to dread!

Before I quit this article of the method of cure, I ought to observe to the patients, and it is an observation equally extensible to all who labor under chronical disorders, especially when they are accompanied with weakness; that they ought not to hope that, in a few days, those evils can be repaired or removed, which are the produce of the errors of years. They must lay their account with being obliged to endure the tediousness of a long cure, and to confine themselves scrupulously to all the rules laid down for their regimen. If sometimes they appear trifling or minute to them, it is because they themselves are not fit judges of the degree of their importance; it would be better for them constantly to repeat to themselves, that the irksome tediousness of the most rigid method of cure is still preferable to a state of any the slightest disease. Be it allowed me to observe, that for one disorder that remains uncured through improper treatment, there are a number, which the indocility of the patients renders incurable, notwithstanding the most well judged assistance given on the part of the physician.

For the securing success, HIPPOCRATES required that the patient, the physician, the attendants, should all equally do their duty; if this concurrence was less rare, the happy issues of disorders would be more frequent. “Let the patient (says ARIDÆUS) have a good heart, and join forces with the physician against the disease[132].” I have seen the most stubborn ones yield to the establishment of this harmony; and recent observations have demonstrated to me, that the virulence of even cancerous disorders has submitted to methods of cure, directed perhaps with some skill, but especially executed with a docility and a regularity of which the successes constituted the best praise.

ARTICLE IV.

_Accessory, or Relative DISEASES._

SECTION XI.

_Nocturnal Pollutions._

I have shown the dangers of an over-abundant evacuation of the seminal liquid, by excesses of venery, and by self-pollution: I have also observed, in the beginning of this work, that it was to be lost both by nocturnal pollutions through libidinous dreams, and by that running called the simple _gonorrhœa_. I shall briefly examine these two disorders.

Such are the laws that unite the soul to the body, that even when the senses are locked up by sleep, the soul is taken up with ideas transmitted to it in the day.

_Res, quæ in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident,_ _Quæque aiunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt_ _Minus mirum est._ ACC.

Another law of this union is, that without disturbing this imprisonment of the other senses; or, that I may express myself less equivocally than in metaphor, without restoring to them their sensibility to external impressions, the soul can, during sleep, beget the motions necessary to the execution of those acts of the will, which the ideas on which she busies herself suggests to her. Taken up with ideas relative to the pleasures of love, delivered up to lascivious dreams, those objects which she paints to herself, produce upon the organs of generation the same motions that they would have produced in the time of being awake, and the act naturally consummates itself in reality, if it is consummated in the imagination. The accident to HORACE in one of the places of repose on his journey to Brundusium, is well known.

_Hic ego mendacem stultissimus usque puellam,_ _Ad mediam noctem expecto: somnus tamen aufert_ _Intentum veneri: tum immundo somnia visu_ _Nocturnam maculant vestem, ventremque supinum._

The organs of generation, on the other hand, when they are the first irritated, sometimes excite nothing but the imagination, and bring on dreams, which terminate as the precedently mentioned ones. These principles serve to explain the different kinds of these nocturnal pollutions.

The first is that which proceeds from an over-abundance of the seminal liquid; it is what persons in the vigor of life, who are sanguine, hearty, and continent, are liable to. The heat of the bed coming to rarefy the humors, and the seminal liquid being more susceptible of rarefaction than any other, the irritated _vesiculæ_ hurry away the imagination, which, being destitute of the helps that would discover the illusion to her, delivers herself wholly up to it; the idea of coition produces the ultimate effect of it, the ejaculation. In this case, this evacuation is not a disease; it is rather a favorable crisis, that disembarrasses from a humor, which, in too great an abundance, or too long retained, might be rather hurtful: and though some Physicians, who have no faith but in what they themselves have seen, have denied it, it is not the less true that this liquid may, by its over-abundance, produce disorders different from the priapism or the _furor uterinus_. I hope I may be allowed a short digression on this question; it is not a foreign one to my subject.

GALEN has preserved to us the history of a man and woman to whom the excess of the seminal liquid was the cause of bad health, and who were both of them cured by renouncing that continency to which they had taxed themselves[133]; and he looks on the retention of this humor as capable of producing very bad effects. I had, at Montpelier, occasion to make an observation, in every point similar to that great man’s. A widow, of a healthy vigorous habit of body, of near forty years of age, who had for a long time been accustomed to the enjoyments of the nuptial bed, and had been for some years deprived of them, used, from time to time, to fall into such violent hysteric fits, that she lost the use of her senses by them: no remedy could dissipate those fits; there was no way to make her come out of them but by strong frictions of the genital parts, which procuring to her a convulsive tremor, followed by a copious ejaculation, she, that instant, recovered her senses.

ZACUTUS LUSITANUS relates a case very similar to this. “A girl (says he) was in a very violent convulsive paroxysm, so as to be on the point of suffocation by it; without feeling, without sense, a general tremor over her whole body, her eyes set; having tried all other remedies in vain, I ordered an acrid irritative pessary to be applied, which produced a copious spermatic evacuation, and she immediately recovered her senses[134].”

M. HOFFMAN has also preserved to us the history of a nun, who could not be recovered out of an hysterical paroxysm but by the excital of that evacuation. And ZACUTUS, in the same work I have just quoted, speaks of two men, to whose health the suppression of the pleasures of love was a detriment. The one was attacked with a swelling at the navel which no remedy could diminish, and which was dissipated on his marrying: the other, weakened by his debauches in that way, quitted them all on a sudden; six months afterwards he had vertigos, and soon afterwards some attacks of a real epilepsy, which were imputed to some disorders of his stomach. Accordingly they gave him stomachics, which exasperated his disorder, and he died in a violent fit of the epilepsy. On being opened, every thing was found in proper order, except the _vesiculæ seminales_ and the _vasa deferentia_, which were found full of a sperm, green, and in some places ulcerous[135].

A Physician, respectable for his skill and for his age, and who long attended the Austrian armies in Italy, told me, he had remarked, that those German soldiers who were not married, and who lived chastely, were often attacked with fits of epilepsy, priapisms, or nocturnal pollutions; accidents which proceeded from an over-abundant secretion of the seminal liquid; which perhaps too had the more stimulative acridity from the heat of the country, where the diet is also more rich.

We have from the same Dr. JAQUES, whom I have quoted in the second Article of this work, a thesis[136], of which M. DE LA METTRIE has given a translation[137], in which he adduces many examples of diseases produced by a privation of the pleasures of venery; and M. DE LA METTRIE mentions another work upon cloistered virginity, of which the object is the same.