§ 105
The practice of Karezza, or the husband’s reserving his own erotic acme, has an interesting sidelight thrown upon it by the experiments of Steinach in cutting the vas deferens. The effect of this is to stop the external secretions of the interstitial gland. “The result is that the seminal vesicle (either one of the two reservoirs for the semen) and the interstitial gland are completely cut off from one another; and this in turn gives rise to a multiplication of the interstitial cells, and to an increase of the hormone produced by them.
“Professor Steinach has performed the operation on men on several occasions. In some instances these men were fairly young but physically weak; in others the subjects were senile men. The appearance of the subjects became youngish, fresh; their bodily strength increased, the tremor of their hand disappeared, memory and will power returned, and the sexual power was restored.”[21]
It seems quite likely that Karezza may produce the same results. It has too the advantage of being removable at will. That is, the husband, in perfect control of his erotism, can thus reduce the external secretions of his interstitial gland himself, without an operation, and reduce it to as low a degree as he finds consonant with the buoyancy of his health, and at the same time not only perfectly satisfy his wife but give her a type and a degree of satisfaction wholly incommensurate with the effort on his own part necessary to accomplish the result. If for any reason whatever it seems at any time again desirable to produce the external secretions he can do so. But it appears quite reasonable to suppose that the arousal of the wife’s full erotism will under such circumstances have the total favourable hygienic effect upon her, and his fears about himself—namely, that by excessive external excretions of the interstitial gland he may be weakening himself—groundless though they may well be, will be quite removed.