When the disease exists with true spermatorrhœa the above treatment is none the less essential, and only needs modification to meet special indications.
The manner of using electricity for the relief of prostatic disease is very simple. My experience has led me into the habit of placing the positive pole as closely in contact as possible with the gland. I sometimes introduce an electrode into the urethra—other times into the rectum—connecting the anode, and with the cathode and large wetted sponge stroking the lumbar and sacral regions, especially over the origin of the hypogastric nerve and plexus. If there be tenderness over any part of the spinal cord, I change the poles and apply the anode to the spinal tenderness. Such tenderness is very common over the sacral plexus. Again, it is important in the way of ascertaining causes, to know which antedates the other, the prostatic tenderness or the spinal tenderness; and the anode should be applied to that irritation which is found to be the most ancient; as, commonly, upon the spinal tenderness the prostatic irritation depends. But this rule is not always tenable, yet will answer very well in a new case until an electric test, as it were, is obtained.
Whenever unrest, pain or fulness follows the use of one pole to the gland, it is safe to change; as such is not the desired effect. There is no one thing so needful in the use of electricity as familiarity with the physiological effects wrought. Every electrician has marked out the management of a patient, and the course proper to pursue, only to find an entire change necessary, after the first application. Many cases are plain, but many more are wonderfully obscure; and only after repeated practical tests, do we find the proper current, intensity and quantity adapted to a given case.
[CHAPTER X.]
[Spermatorrhœa.]—That special form of sexual neurosis, which has for its most common phenomenon the premature and involuntary ejaculation of seminal fluid, has been the great catch-all of fakirs and venders of popular sexual literature. Not a town of any size in any country is without an advertising spermatorrhœa doctor, who cries his vocation and writes up his fraudulent certificates of thousands of cases cured, and the great danger of millions more sinking into premature decay. Strange that laws are not made to prohibit this wholesale deception of a confiding and innocent class of young men. Spermatorrhœa does exist, but in proportion to the effects of masturbation and sexual debauch, grave injury is exceedingly uncommon. Not because spermatorrhœa is a commonly grave disease, do I insert this paragraph; but because of the unpopularity of the subject, the isolated cases that are really bad, and the still more isolated ones that fall into the hands of the legitimate physician.
The term, spermatorrhœa, has been too loosely applied to a class of [cases] which the author has chosen to describe under [pseudo-spermatorrhœa], and also to a class of cases more properly called sexual neurasthenia; when the weakness of a nervous character is only noticeable in a minor degree, or in contradistinction to centric structural changes. But the term is useful to describe such losses as are involuntary, and of frequent occurrence; or, as it were, such as occur without intentional friction of the glans, or without undue nervous shock from accident or fear of injury. To such emissions should the term be confined. Healthy young men sometimes have emissions before or soon after the intromission of the penis, and such occurrences are not uncommon; but with the individual such an occurrence rarely happens: such should not be called spermatorrhœa—only a sexual weakness—neurasthenia. Again, after prolonged sexual excitement, when the organs are simply weak and the erotic energy intense, an emission is not sufficient to declare such a diagnosis.
When it is customary for a male to ejaculate immediately after intromission of the organ, he may have, and quite likely has, a spermatorrhœa; but this is not in itself diagnostic of anything further than mere weakness; and he must at other times than these lose semen, to constitute that real flow which is the true signification of the term. When a male commonly ejaculates before venereal friction of the glans has taken place, and in successive attempts at sexual congress has been baffled, he most certainly has spermatorrhœa, as well as partial impotence. Whenever an involuntary emission is followed by weakness, headache, wakefulness, heat of the skin, there is certainly great sexual neurasthenia; and, if such losses are continuous, the diagnosis of spermatorrhœa is without a doubt. It is necessary that these points should be duly understood, in order that our future study of the disease may not lead to confusion in the study of the conditions of the nervous system leading to such phenomena.
In common [cases] of the disease, the losses of semen are as often as two or three times a week; not uncommonly, every night, for a week or two; and then an interval of a week, when the nightly ejaculations occur with a dreamy, erotic pleasure, with the patient half sleeping. The young man wakes up and finds his linen soiled: he remembers his dream and is highly disgusted, and soon visits or writes to a traveling or standing venerealist, who sends him a circular containing the thousands of cases treated and cured, with a poetical description of the ten years hence, and perhaps a Marriage Guide, and the price required to cure such a case. He feels all the many things pictured in the book, and if the fee is within reach he is sure to send it, and only too soon finds how badly he is victimized. Not every case is troublesome enough to visit a specialist; or the young man is wise enough to first call upon the family doctor, or a friendly physician, when he is sent home with an opposite kind of discouragement; or he is treated by the latter M. D. (?), who has not booked himself on such matters, and the poor fellow is left to himself and the “specialists.”