Part 4

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.