When the dorsal region is involved and tender, as might be supposed, there will appear gastric troubles; acidity, pyrosis, nausea and vomiting, gastrodynia; again intercostal neuralgia and rheumatism, cough and dyspnœa, palpitation, fits of fainting and epileptiform convulsions.
Case.—Mrs. P., in addition to unmistakable symptoms of spinal anæmia, with dorsal tenderness would, at the sudden closure of a door, complain of great pain in her abdomen, stomach and uterus. On several occasions she had had involuntary evacuation of fœces and urine during a thunderstorm. Her skin would be covered with cold sweat (hyperidrosis). Medicine had very little influence in this case; but electricity applied daily for three months—a mild current of Faradisation—effected a very satisfactory improvement. This was a case of sexual origin and a result of fifteen years’ sexual excess in her early life; after which she married well to enjoy the remainder of her life in wedlock under the care of a physician constantly.
The cervical region is not uncommonly affected and may be very tender, which may produce pain in the stomach and nausea, rejecting everything swallowed, at times. Sleep is nearly always deranged: sometimes sleeplessness, and again, in the same patient, profound coma of long duration is observed, and somnambulism is also likely to occur in such cases. Twitching of muscles, contraction of flexor tendons, hiccough, aphonia, vertigo, head-pain through the top, tinnitus aurium, disturbance of vision, asthenopia, and mental derangements, as the last stage of the disease, when the brain and entire nervous system are in a feeble condition: all follow, in rare occurrence, the sexual debauch, and are symptoms of the entailed conditions, viz., sexual neurosis, of which spermatorrhœa is only one of the numerous symptoms, yet perhaps the most attractive.
As these foregoing types or conditions advance, they become complicated and even change in essential features; but if not remedied, the result must be toward paralysis, insanity, tabes dorsalis, epilepsy and imbecility; all of which can best be studied as special diseases in numerous volumes on diseases of the nervous system.
[Cerebral Sexual Neurosis.]—That form of neurosis, brought on by masturbation in adolescence and sexual excesses, does not exist independently of other portions of the nervous system, and only as the spinal cord becomes impaired by excessive sexual shocks and evolution of nerve-force, which is expended in orgasms during sexual excitement, does the brain become involved, and its tissues fail, by feeble perpetuative force, to evolve healthy intellect. When the formative forces fail to construct as perfect a brain-structure as has existed, renewal is required more and more often, which cannot be brought about by the impaired nerve-forces, and softening must, necessarily, follow or, at least, a mal-renewal and mal-construction of cells and neuroglia, too unnatural to evolve the elements of healthy mind.
That there is a connecting link between the intellectual and the sexual there can be no doubt, and that for the sexual to be appreciated, without the assistance of the intellectual, would be only animal and should not be considered advisable for human beings, but that the intellectual should not only predominate, but preside over, all sexual conditions.
Thomas would have us believe that the cerebellum is the seat of amative desire, and that that organ presides over the sexual function. Again, an opposite claim has attempted to overthrow such doctrines, by experiments to prove that the cerebellum presides over coôrdination of muscular movements.
I am not prepared to accept the doctrine of either as true, but only can see evidence that both may be disturbed or lost for a time by pressure upon, or section of, a part of the cerebellum, and that this organ perhaps tends to effect an equilibrium of the nervous forces between the cerebrum and cord, and also as a generator of nerve-force. We do know that coôrdination of muscular movements is interfered with by any structural changes in this organ; but it would seem that, if the sexual was so much depending upon the cerebellum for force, or there was such an intimate relation between these organs, muscular movement would be oftener impaired or disturbed by reflex irritation, owing to the frequency of impotence and other genital diseases, through the close relations supposed to exist between the genitalia and cerebellum. The coôrdination of muscles is seldom interfered with by sexual diseases directly, but only as a secondary issue, by first producing chronic impairment of the nutritive forces, and thereby effecting the changes in nerve-cells.
The sensitive nervous organizations are of themselves predisposed to morbid changes, from too often repeated shocks of pleasure or grief; such persons are first to suffer mentally through shame, from having indulged in such vices, and secondly, from actual structural changes that have occurred.