Sexual Neuroses

by J. T. Kent

I am credibly informed of an occasion: “A prostitute received the embraces of eleven men in immediate succession: the ninth and eleventh took gonorrhœa, and again gave it; but the prostitute remained free from the disease until two months after, when she took the disease from one to whom she had given it, on the above-mentioned occasion, after which she spread it through a small town in which she lived and also in which she was in the habit of plying her vocation. She was free from disease before this occasion.”

It is no more doubted that a male will contract a purulent urethritis from contact with a woman during her menstrual crisis, or if she be afflicted with an infective leucorrhœa; but such a discharge in the male is not generally contagious, and he may indulge freely without giving the disease.

Uncleanliness may be considered a common cause of sexual disease in both sexes.

Masturbation, after the age of maturity is no more injurious, aside from the degradation it leads to, than the same number of contacts in the natural manner; but in the youth the undeveloped organs suffer, as well as the nerve-centers which supply these organs with nervous energy. The youth is inclined to indulge the habit after once initiated, greatly to the detriment of the spinal cord, and through this to the general nervous system. He is inclined to practice the deplorable vice oftener than he could find opportunity to gratify his passion in the natural way. As a rule, to the indiscretions of youth is confined the permanent injury to the nervous system. It is at an early age, when so much injury is done, that the very common practice occurs at schools, when boys club together in squads and go behind embankments of stone-wall, or creek-banks; or a boy isolates himself, as it were, to “shell out a grist by hand.” With such ample opportunities, and with the habit fully established, the acts are repeated with such frequency that exhaustion of the nervous power must often attend this wonderful deviation from nature’s designs.

With all this supposed nervous weakness, I do not incline to the opinion that more injury is done to the sexual organs by this practice, in and of itself, than is accomplished through the impressions wrought upon the brain from reading spermatorrhœa literature of advertising, “private-disease” specialists. I am satisfied that I have seen bad cases recover by putting their minds at ease. The carefully worded little books, that are sent broadcast to drive in those who have been indiscreet, are money-making dodges, and are of great injury to the confiding and simple.

When the injury has become very extensive and the condition of habit very depraved, a young man becomes so attached to his lothly vice that he will refuse the natural way of gratifying the erotic desire. He is not in the least influenced by one of the opposite sex, and prefers his own company, or isolation.

It is not the mule only that suffers from masturbation, but girls as well, though not so commonly, suffer from this peculiar sexual neurasthenia and hysteria growing out of sexual abuse. Our opportunities for discovering the extent of such practices in the unmarried female are very limited; consequently, we remain in ignorance to a great degree.

The married woman furnishes the physician the majority of the practice in this class of cases, as she also suffers from a mismanagement of the sexual congress; and it is only to the married woman that the practical physician will need to devote extensive attention, and only through her, in this sphere, can much information be obtained.

In the prostitute, sexual contacts are too promiscuous, and she is too unreliable, to afford any very trustworthy information, further than may be judged by the aspect of one who has followed the business for a decade. It is little to know that her life, as a rule, is short and her social redemption next to impossible, and her entailed ills irremediable. When the habit of self-pollution is once established by a girl, it is worse than in the male; as a female is not so likely to yield to any sort of a vice as a male, and she will carry it to a greater extreme. Modesty and fear of giving offence will always impede the advancement of knowledge in regard to the sexual functions in the so-called chaste and unmarried.