Part 6

According to this reasoning a child is not known to be a human being till some time after its birth. And this is not uttered by some speculative philosopher in his closet, but by a medical practitioner on his daily rounds, tools in hand, as it were, to carry out his theory and break the skulls of any and all luckless babes that may come in his way in the exercise of what he calls his legitimate practice. How long after birth the child remains without becoming a human being, he does not pretend to know; they remain non-human till they manifest mental action. Till then, not being human, he assigns them no human rights--no rights at all which we are conscientiously obliged to respect. Herod may have been right after all when he appointed the term of two years old and under as the limit of the butchery at Bethlehem. The writer pretends to lessen the horror inspired by his theory by referring to some restrictions of canon law. But what do he and his like care about canon law? He would be the first to scout the idea of letting canon law limit his freedom of action and speculation.

What would be the real results in practical life if we were to accept as rules of conduct these rash theories of agnostic philosophers and infidel scientists? Justly does the writer proceed to say: "I am well aware that the idea arouses antagonism and inflammatory denunciation in some minds." Certainly it does. He adds: "That it [the idea] will prove to be the true one, however, depends only on the truth of the general theory of development." If this be the logical consequence of evolution, or Darwinism, as he calls it, then all the worse for Darwinism. Society cannot get along on a theory that begets such principles of action; the more so since, in Spencer's and in Darwin's system, the human soul, even in grown persons, is only a material modification of the body and perishes with it in death. Hence there would be no responsibility after death. On this theory the physician is only a lump of very curiously evolved matter; he, too, like the embryo, is without an immortal soul, is not a free being, and therefore is incapable of having rights or duties.

Before we remodel our codes of Ethics and Jurisprudence by the admission into them of such destructive and revolutionary principles, we shall at least be allowed to challenge these aggressors and ask solid proof of their rash innovations. We may address to them the wise words uttered against similar speculators by one of the most logical of modern reasoners, the illustrious Cardinal Newman. "Why may not my first principles contest the prize with yours? they have been longer in the world, they have lasted longer, they have done harder work, they have seen rougher service. You sit in your easy-chairs, you dogmatize in your lecture-rooms, you wield your pens: it all looks well on paper; you write exceedingly well; there never was an age in which there was better writing, logical, nervous, eloquent, and pure,--go and carry it out in the world. Take your first principles, of which you are so proud, into the crowded streets of our cities, into the formidable classes which make up the bulk of our population: try to work society by them. You think you can; I say you cannot; at least you have not as yet, it is to be seen if you can.... My principles, which I believe to be eternal, have at least lasted eighteen hundred years; let yours last as many months.... These principles have been the life of nations; they have shown they could be carried out; let any single nation carry out yours" ("Present Position of Catholics in England." p. 293).

Gentlemen, let no one trifle with the principles of Ethics and Jurisprudence; human society cannot get along without them. Morality is the heart of civilization: its principles are the life-blood, which it sends forth to feed and warm and strengthen and beautify all the organs of its earthly frame. A flesh-wound may be healed, a bone may be set, it may knit and grow vigorous again; but you must not puncture the heart, nor attempt to change the natural channels of the circulating blood, under the penalty of having a corpse on your hands. So you must respect the eternal laws that direct the current of man's moral actions, the principles of Ethics and Jurisprudence.

LECTURE V.

VENEREAL EXCESSES.

In the opening lecture of this course, I remarked to you, gentlemen, that the scope of Medical Jurisprudence is much wider than that of Medical Law. It embraces many subjects of which human laws take no cognizance, and in particular such vicious actions as do not violate the rights of others, but are injurious to those only who practise them. They undermine the health and shorten the lives of the guilty parties, and bring in their train diseases the most destructive and often the most incurable. It is the physician's beneficent task to lessen the weaknesses and sufferings of the body, and to prolong human life in well-preserved vigor to a green old age. It is not the least important part of his valuable services to provide for the sound and vigorous propagation of the human race to future generations. Of this propagation of our race, of the laws which govern it, and of the criminal abuses by which these laws are violated, I am to treat in this present lecture. My subject is "Venereal Excesses."

I. If a physician's purpose were only to make money, his task would then be to multiply diseases and infirmities; he would then be as great a curse to mankind as he is really intended to be a blessing; and an immense blessing he will be to his fellow-men if he studies to remove even the remote causes of diseases and untimely deaths. He can do so in a variety of ways and not the least by providing against sexual excesses and abuses. These are a copious fountain of ill to humanity. A host of diseases, such as tuberculosis, diabetes, cardial and nervous affections, epilepsy, hysteria, general debility, weaknesses of sight, languor and general worthlessness, hypochondria, weakness and total loss of reason, and, in married life, impotence and sterility are some of the effects of venereal excesses. Any excitement of the sexual passion before the body has received its full development is more or less injurious to its welfare; and all excesses or unnatural indulgence of it at any period of life is pregnant with deplorable consequences. Now, such evil practices are too much overlooked by many physicians; yet it is certain that thousands of patients might, by timely warning on these matters, be saved from unspeakable mental and physical sufferings. To give sensible and intelligible directions on a subject as delicate as it is important in medical practice, it will be necessary to enter into some scientific details.

The passion which prompts to sexual intercourse is altogether natural in itself, and, as such, intended by the Creator to be indulged in at the right time and in the proper manner. It is the stimulus which He has provided for the propagation of the human race. If the stimulus is strong at times, this too is a special effect of His wisdom; because without a powerful prompting of this kind, most men would shirk the burden of married life, just as very many would not care to toil if they had no hunger and thirst and other bodily wants to satisfy.

But though all these cravings are useful and even indispensable to mankind, all of them need the regulation of reason. When they are indulged immoderately or in unnatural ways, they become most copious sources of bodily diseases, of mental disorders, and moral degradation. Every one knows how the passion of drink, when abused, proves the ruination of millions; excessive eating, too, injures the systems of countless people. But no animal passion is more liable to become disorderly, none needs more firm control and habitual watchfulness, than the passion of lust. Reason dictates that it should be indulged for no other purpose than that for which the Creator has made it, namely, marital intercourse. I say _marital_ and not merely sexual intercourse; for outside of married life all nations have always condemned its indulgence.

Besides, it is only in the married state that the children, which are the fruit of such intercourse, can be properly educated. To generate a race of young barbarians is certainly not the purpose of the sexual relations. Children must not be begotten unless they can be properly raised, in a manner worthy of their noble destiny. Now, it is only in the married state, in the family or domestic society, that they can be thus educated. They need the tender hand of a mother to supply their material wants; they need the manly care of a devoted father to provide the necessaries of life, his firm hand to break their wanton wills, and his wise direction to set them well on the road to temporal and eternal happiness. Therefore, no one has the right to beget or to bear children except in marital life. Now, the sexual passion is to be exercised only in connection with its proper object, the procreation of children and the fostering of such mutual love between husband and wife as is conducive to domestic happiness. Therefore this passion is to be kept under careful and rational constraint. This the law of morality requires; all nations have ever exacted that this passion shall be subject to established rules; no free-love has ever been tolerated where there was the least pretence to civilization, and I do not know that it was ever permitted even among barbarians.

Even the distant approach that Mormonism made towards free-love has been absolutely condemned and repressed by the common-sense of the American people, as incompatible with civilization. In fact, all history testifies that the true civilization of any race or country rises or falls with the restraints imposed on the passion of lust; no polygamous nation has ever been more than half-civilized. The greatness of Rome and Greece decayed when the laws of social purity declined; and in our own day the immorality of what is called "the social evil" is the darkest stain on modern civilization.

And what we say of civilization or social soundness, the soundness of the body politic, applies in a great measure to individual soundness, the health of every person's mind and body. Personal purity promotes health and vigor, it lends beauty to form, gives a keen edge to the intellect, adds energy and brings success to manhood, and prepares for enduring and honored old age. Venereal excesses, on the contrary, undermine the vigor of the constitution, bring on a host of bodily infirmities, exhaust the system before the proper time, debauch and degrade the mind and will, and prepare their victims for an early grave or a decrepit old age.

II. But how can a passion so ardent be properly restrained? In particular, what can a physician do to prevent the manifold injuries which, if not properly controlled, it will bring to his patients? These are practical questions directly to our purpose.

The first requisite for all effective action is to have correct knowledge and strong convictions on a subject. No one will check a passion with firmness if he have a lingering doubt as to whether, after all, he is strictly bound to restrain it. As a man's mind matures, at least if his mind be upright and not distorted by the strain of a ruling passion, he understands more and more thoroughly that his perfection consists and his highest interests lie in obeying at all times the law of reason, in maintaining his specific dignity of a rational being, and not allowing himself to be controlled by passion, the ruling power of brute animals. Besides, he becomes aware in various ways of the evil results of immoral practices, and he sees many reasons to keep his passions in check. But young people have neither such experience nor such information, and they are not always wise enough to understand the imperative dictates of self-restraint. And yet it is often in early years, while body and mind are in the period of development, that the most serious injury is done to the constitution and to the character by the indulgence of carnal pleasures. Habits are then engendered which become a real slavery; so that later in life when there arises a sincere desire to stop such disgraceful practices, there is a feeling of impotence to resist temptations which by one's own fault have become a second nature.

What then can be done with the young? They must early and authoritatively be told of the wrong, the sin of base self-indulgence, and of every practice that leads to it. If a beginning of immorality is discovered in a child, it must be plainly told and emphatically warned of the serious consequences involved. The child's mother is, as a rule, the best guide and director in infancy. Later on, the Doctor has frequent chances to do so; it comes from him with better grace than from others; and his warning is likely to be minded, because it is clear that he knows and ought to know what he is talking about with regard to bodily consequences. Yet it is always a matter of delicacy; and great care should be taken lest, while pointing out the evil, there be also a stimulus added to a prurient curiosity.

Much good sense is required in any given case to decide whether more good or more evil is likely to result from the warning; in doubt of success, it is better to leave the matter alone.

"Where ignorance is bliss 'Tis folly to be wise."

The safest way of repressing the passion of lust is the provision that an all-wise Providence supplies in Religion, in which God authoritatively forbids all immoral action and even all immoral coveting or desire. Positive dogmatic teaching on this subject is required, especially with the young. You cannot argue with them on this matter as you can with grown people. That is one reason why religious teaching should permeate early education. The Decalogue should be the back-bone of a child's training: and it should be proposed on the authority of God, and explained so as to check not only sinful acts, but also covetings, prurient curiosity, improper reading, immodest looks and thoughts, in a word, whatever paves the way to the walks of sin. The greatest of teachers has Himself laid down the law in this matter: it must be proposed as coming from His divine lips, as it did: "I say to you that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (St. Matt. v. 28). The lesson is enforced by these words of the great Apostle: "Neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate ... shall possess the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. vi. 9, 10).

True, the child will not realize the full import of such lessons; but he will understand it in due time; and already in early years he will be warned against indulging his nascent passions. It is well that the conscience should be early awakened in this matter; for the more this passion is indulged, the more it craves for further indulgence till it becomes almost uncontrollable.

III. No possible evil to any individual man or woman can result from the firm control that one may acquire over the passion of lust. On the contrary, if it should be controlled all through life, this would only add to a man's strength of mind, firmness of will, soundness of body, and length of life. For in the school of morality, in which every Physician should be educated, the leading principle is: "Contraries are cured by contraries," "_Contraria contrariis curantur_." On this principle, lust is most efficiently controlled by aiming, at least in youth, at total abstinence from its indulgence. You know that, in the Catholic Church, priests and religious lead a single life, and pledge themselves for life to practise the most perfect control of the sexual passion. What do you think is the result of their total abstinence on this point with regard to their length of days? As a rule their life is much longer, in normal circumstances, than that of the other learned professions. Here are a few proofs. In France, during the twenty years from 1823 to 1843, 750 priests died in the diocese of Paris. Of these only 200 were under sixty years old; there were 554 between sixty and seventy years old, 448 over seventy, and 177 over eighty. Again, of 202 Carmelite nuns who died in a large convent of Paris, Dr. Descuret, the attending physician, states that 82 had lived over seventy years, 23 over eighty years. Most Trappists and Carthusians die of scarcely any other sickness than old age. All young people who aspire to the clerical or religious profession learn from their early years the holiness and the loveliness of purity. Our Church effects this result by placing before their youthful imaginations the most perfect of patterns of virtue, the infant Saviour, the virgin Mother, the boy saints Aloysius and Stanislaus, the maidens Agatha and Cecilia, and a whole phalanx of Christian heroes and heroines.

I dwell the more willingly on this subject, gentlemen, because, besides protecting modesty in your young patients generally, it may fall to the lot of some of you, in the course of your professional careers, to be attending physicians to religious houses; and you will then appreciate the delicacy of the flowers of virtue that bloom beneath the shadow of the sanctuary. Certainly even there you may happen to find isolated cases of infidelity to duty; for human nature is not angelic nature; but in such abodes it comes near to it, at least for the vast majority.

IV. On the other hand, what sad havoc does not the sexual passion play where it is precociously developed and wantonly indulged. Dr. H. Fournier, one of the most eminent physicians of Paris, says: "There is not a vice more fatal to the conservation of man than masturbation." This unfortunate habit is sometimes acquired by very little boys and girls. Foolish or vicious nurses may bring it on by handling young children most indelicately. This is one of the many reasons why none but virtuous servants and nurses should be employed by wise parents and physicians. In later years, children often learn this degrading and most injurious vice from their depraved companions, some of whom seem even to regard the practice of it as a manly accomplishment. When habitually indulged in, it produces on the health and the strength of the constitution effects the most deplorable. Even the intellect is liable to become thereby enfeebled, a want of virility is exhibited both in the body and in the mind of its victims; then follows a loss of ambition and self-control. "When this morbid passion gets control of a person," writes an experienced practitioner in medicine, "it is as though an unclean spirit had entered, subdued the will, weakened the moral forces, enfeebled the intellectual faculties, lessened the power to resist temptation, and overcome every obstacle opposed to its gratification. Even while the intellect is still clear, and the sense of wrong keen, the individual is a slave to this morbid impulse." Though the baneful effects may not always affect the physical health of the victim, the unfortunate practice very often engenders in boys and girls tendencies which in later years lead to all the miseries conspicuous in houses of debauch and infamy. But I need not dwell on consequences that belong to pathology rather than to Jurisprudence.

V. Confining myself to my sphere of what is morally right or wrong, I must be permitted to point out some gross violations of duty in some members of your honored profession. There are physicians so reckless of consequences and of principles alike as to advise at times the practice of illicit sexual intercourse. Let them beware; they are doing a very unwise and guilty act. Even if an immoral practice should save a human life, it may not be indulged, on the principle which must be by this time very familiar to your ears, that the end does not justify the means. And besides no good result can be expected from what is contrary to the law of nature and of nature's God. It was to punish sins of the flesh that the Deluge was sent, which destroyed nearly the whole human race. "All flesh had corrupted its way," says the sacred historian. It was to punish unlawful indulgence of lust that Sodom and Gomorrha were destroyed by fire from heaven; and the memory of these guilty cities is preserved in the very name of Sodomy. Onan, as the same sacred volume relates (Gen. xxxviii), performed the marriage act in a manner to frustrate it of its legitimate purpose, the generation of children, and the Lord slew him; and his sin is to this very day branded with his name and called Onanism. And yet in Christian lands physicians are found who will at times dare to recommend such practices to their patients.

On the occasions mentioned, God punished the guilty miraculously; but that is not His usual way. He has so contrived our natures that sins committed against His laws in our bodies ordinarily bring a part of their punishment in their train, not the less certain because slower in its operation than a miracle would be. All the venereal diseases are there to act as earthy ministers of Heaven's justice, anticipating, and often mercifully averting, the punishments of the future world.

VI. Besides private and secret tortures of body and mind, a public and most deplorable calamity has descended of late on our own vigorous young nation, as well as on some older lands, threatening in the not distant future the extinction of many of its most esteemed families and of what was, not long ago, a vigorous stock. The following article by Dr. Walter Lindley, Professor of Gynecology in the University of Southern California, will explain the matter better than my words could do. It was read in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Southern Californian Medical Society in June, 1895, and is printed in the "N. Y. Medical Journal" of August 17 of the same year (pp. 211 and following). It is headed "American Sterility;" I will quote freely from it:

"The obstetrician finds his vocation disappearing among the American women from the face of the earth.

"It is a fact that the American family with more than one or two children is the exception. From the records of six generations of families in some New England towns, it was found that the families comprising the first generation had on an average between eight and ten children; the next three generations averaged about seven to each family; the fifth generation less than three to each family. The generation now on the stage is not doing so well as that. In Massachusetts the average family numbers less than three persons. In 1885 the census of Massachusetts disclosed that 71.28 per cent of the women of that State were childless. The census of 1885 in the State of New York shows that twenty-five per cent of the women of that State are childless, fifty per cent average less than one child, and seventy-five per cent average only a trifle over one child.

"Southern California has fully as dark a record as New England--that is, in the family where the man and wife are American-born. It goes without saying that the medical profession in this country is composed to a great extent of typical progressive Americans, and I ask you to make mental statistics of the children in the families of the physicians in Southern California, and you will find very few of them containing more than two.

"Had the Rev. T. R. Malthus lived in the United States to-day, he would never have argued about the danger of over-population, as he did in his interesting volume on 'The Principles of Population.'"

After quoting the views of Plato, Aristotle, and Lycurgus, Dr. Lindley continues: "In Southern California there are, it is true, many children, but the average American family is very small.