As far as humanity is concerned, the most important part in the science of sexuality is the hygiene of the vita sexualis. Preventive medicine will score its greatest successes in the field of sexual diseases. If the rules of personal hygiene are followed they may prevent many an anomaly which, when once established, is seldom amenable to treatment.
Especially does the principle, “prevention is the best cure,” hold good in the anomalies of anaesthesia. In almost ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these anomalies are contracted through the patient’s own recklessness and fault. If the patient could be guarded against sexual excesses, the main cause of impotence in all its ramifications would be removed. But the necessity of avoiding certain things requires a proper insight into the nature of these things. To be good requires a proper knowledge of the evil. “We cannot,” says Hain Friswell (Essays on English writers), “be good by pretending not to know evil. When women go mad, the most innocent, the youngest, the most purely educated often utter the most horrid and obscene language; a proof that to them evil has been known; how acquired, how taught, it is vain to ask. What the teacher ought to seek is, not to blot out and veil iniquity, since that will always be visible, but to make the heart strong enough to cast out the evil.”
To accomplish this end proper instruction in matters of sex is a condition sine qua non. The instruction should begin before the sexual idea has an emotional garb. When the habit of masturbation has once been contracted, it is very hard to break it; when promiscuous life has been tasted, all knowledge of its dangers will seldom protect the individual from continuing such a life.[BJ]
The missionary work must, therefore, begin in the nursery. The drunkard is not expected to embrace temperance by acquiring the knowledge of the injurious effects of excesses in alcohol upon soul and body. His impaired will cannot resist temptation. He must be taught to be temperate before he becomes a drunkard. The same is the case with the boy who has once tasted illicit venery. All the preaching will generally be for naught. Knowledge at this time comes too late. The young man who has gone through all the suffering of gonorrhea and syphilis, as soon as he is cured, and sometimes even before a perfect cure has been reached, forgets everything, under passion to resistless impulse, and associates again with meretricious women. His practical experience, just as the theoretical knowledge of the medical student, is not powerful enough to keep away a man from illicit indulgence, once he has made its acquaintance. But if the dangers are known to the individual before he has tasted from the forbidden tree of knowledge, he will, in most cases, avoid tasting the fruit which may contain one of the deadliest poisons.
Hence the lessons in sex-matters must be given quite early. It is very unfortunate that even the cultured public has not learned yet that the young child, even the infant, shows some sex manifestation. The general public is unwilling to be enlightened about the genetic functions of the child. There is no need to go as far as Freud’s school and reduce the most innocent infantile natural activities to the emotions of sex; still it is agreed among the keenest observers that, if infants and small children are not carefully watched and protected against themselves, lewd servants, and ignorant mothers, autoeroticism may be established at such an early period that the first lesson in sex instruction will come too late. For masturbation, once it has become a habit, will seldom be relinquished until normal sex relations take its place, instruction or no instruction.[BK] The child must be brought up in such a way that it will reach puberty without any kind of contamination, either by masturbation or by prostitution.
Only upon such pure and chaste children will lectures on the dangers of sex irregularities have any influence. The reason why the medical student with all his supposed knowledge of sex is not different from any other young man, is that he acquired his knowledge too late to be of any value. If he had begun his studies on the pathology of syphilis and gonorrhoea and had known the dangers of the venereal scourge before he ever had a taste of sex, it is very likely that with the knowledge of the danger lurking, not only to himself but also to those dearest to a man’s heart, his future wife and children, he would abstain from the association with meretricious venery. But when the medical student began to gain the knowledge of sex,[BL] it was too late for him to resist. Like the habitual drunkard, he had lost the power of resistance.
Education of infants.—The teaching of matters sexual must hence begin very early in life. Cases are known where masturbation was started before the first year of the child’s life had passed. The child has the impulse to touch and pull everything within its reach. Hence the infant will also try to play with its genitals. A phimosis or an inflammation of the prepuce, in the boy, and in the girl uncleanliness in the vulva or pin-worms in the rectum, may cause itching in the genital parts and induce the child to touching and rubbing these parts. The manipulations may cause an agreeable tickling sensation and may awaken a feeling of lust. The feeling operates then in the memory and excites to a taste of sexual activity before sexual consciousness has had time to be naturally awakened through the growth of the sex-centres.
Sometimes servants, either to quiet the child or out of lust and ignorance, tickle the child’s genital organs or gently slap the gluteal region and thus awaken a lustful feeling.
The natural curiosity of children often leads them to an examination and finally to a titillation of their genital organs, even without the aid of any vicious instruction.
It is, therefore, the duty of parents to prevent their infants from becoming masturbators. They must see to it that the child does not manipulate with its genitals. The little hand ought not to touch any part below the waist-line.