The plea that this unnatural practice will lessen the risk of infection to the sensualist in promiscuous intercourse is not one that our honourable profession will support.
Parents, therefore, should be warned that this ugly mutilation of their children involves serious danger, both to their physical and moral health.
It is a fact which deserves serious consideration that many ignorant women purposely resort to vicious sexual manipulation to soothe their fractious infants. The superintendent of a large prison for women informed me that this was a common practice, and one most difficult, even impossible entirely to break up.
Medical observation proves that such injury to infancy is not confined to the lower or to the criminal classes. The habits formed by unrefined or exposed women are brought by servants into our homes. The ignorance or viciousness of nurses, often veiled by a respectable demeanour, has injured and even destroyed the children of many a well-to-do nursery.
That this habit of self-abuse existing in early childhood is a danger capable of undermining the health from its tendency to increase is a very serious fact. A little girl of six years old was lately brought to me whose physical and mental strength were both failing from the nervous exhaustion of a habit so inveterate that she fell into convulsions if physically restrained from its exercise. In this case an evil hereditary tendency from both parents was discovered, and malformation existed in the child. Indeed, cases of injury to childhood from self-abuse are so common in the physician’s experience that warning to parents should be given on this subject. The cause should be carefully sought for wherever this vicious practice is discovered, and the trusted family physician consulted if necessary.
Now, it is quite true that this habit, when observed in children, may often, and I believe generally, be broken up. It is the mother who must do this by sympathy and wise oversight. When a child is known in any way to be producing pressure or excitement in these parts, the watchful observation of the mother must be at once aroused. If no physical cause of irritation, such as worms or some malformation, appears to be present, the dangerous habit may be broken up entirely; but no punishment must ever be resorted to. The little innocent child, to whom the sentiment of sex is an unknown thing, will confide in its mother if encouraged to do so. If kindly but seriously told that it may make little children ill to do this thing, and the reply being given (as in cases I have known) that ‘the little feeling comes of itself,’ the child should be encouraged to come to its mother, and she ‘will help him drive the feeling away.’
This providential guardianship of the portals of life is a special endowment of maternity, and it is the potential motherhood of all experienced women which fits them to understand and to guide the growth and development of the sexual powers of our human nature. The tact of a mother will never suggest evil to her child, but her quick perception of danger will enable her to detect its signs, and avert it.
The frequent practice of self-abuse occurring in little children from the age of two years old, clearly illustrates the fallacy of endeavouring to separate mind and body in educational arrangements or systems of medical treatment. In the very young child those essential elements of reproduction, semen and ova, which give such mighty stimulus to passion in the adult, are entirely latent. Yet we observe a distinct mental impression possible, leading to unnatural excitement of the genital organs. This mental impression, growing with the growth of the child, produces an undue sensitiveness to all surrounding circumstances which tend to excite this cerebral action. Touch, sight, and hearing become avenues to the brain, prematurely opened to this kind of stimulus. The acts of the lower animals, pictures, indecent talk, which glide over the surface of the mind in a naturally healthy child, excite self-conscious attention when habits of self-abuse have grown up unchecked. The mind is thus rendered impure, and the growing lad or girl develops into a precocious sexual consciousness.
At school a new danger arises to children from corrupt communication of companions, or in the boy from an intense desire to become a man, with a false idea of what manliness means. The brain, precociously stimulated in one direction, receives fresh impulse from evil companionship and evil literature, and even hitherto innocent children of ten and twelve are often drawn into the temptation.