In a little while you are surprised to receive mail from all parts of the country—all wanting you to purchase a varicocele cure. This applies to vacuum pumps, the superior system, the Parisian system and other fakes of a like nature. They are all frauds. In the past few years I have raided their places many times, seized their literature, which is always obscene and indecent, and arrested the proprietors. The game, however, still goes on.
The "Nervous Debility Specialist."
"Lost Manhood Restored" is probably the greatest of all medical grafts. These men succeed simply because of the total ignorance of the people on matters pertaining to the sexual system.
If sexual physiology was a part of the studies in the public schools for pupils at the age of fourteen there would be no cases of nervous debility, and the "lost manhood" physician would have to seek other fields for the display of his talents.
One of the saddest of all the habits that young men drop into at some period of their lives is the secret vice. Until quite lately prudery has prevented its proper discussion and about the only literature on the subject was to be found in that issued by advertising doctors who treat the effects.
One thing is certain—no one ever acquired the habit by reading one of these "scare" or quack books. John Stuart Mill, in speaking of this vice, says: "The diseases of society can be no more checked or healed without publicly speaking of them than can those of the body." To ignore or deny the prevalence of the evil is sometimes honest ignorance, but is more often hypocrisy.
A little scientific discussion on this subject is not out of place here. It will put young men on their guard against themselves, and cut off in some degree the income of that class of doctors who live on their credulity.
So far as I have been able to trace its origin it has always been with us. According to Ovid, Horace and Aristophanes, it was a curse in ancient Greece and Rome. Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine 380 years before Christ, considered it a subject worthy of his pen. Of modern writers the greatest was Tissot, in 1760, who issued a classic on this subject whose object was to stay, if possible, the abuses and vices which threatened the ruin of the French people. Lurid as the little book distributed by specialists usually is, the effects of this vice depicted by Tissot puts them all into the shade. If not exactly scientific, it at least exerted a large moral influence which was beneficial in the then state of public and private morals.
In the discussion of secret sin let us make it plain that the evil effects are not immediate, as is often thought and frequently taught by school teachers and writers. The brain is not palsied at once. Dementia, palsy and sudden death are not likely to occur. The erroneous idea that it does, accounts in a great measure for the terror, the bashfulness and the love of solitude exhibited by this class of sufferers.