I have since seen another terrible example of this total and mortal rigescence, which will deserve a specification here.
On the 10th of February, 1760, I was called to visit, in the country, a man of about forty years of age, who had been very strong and robust, but who had been guilty of great excesses with women and wine, and who had moreover often exercised himself at trials of bodily strength. It was some months precedently that his disorder had begun by a weakness in his legs which made him stagger as he walked, as if he had been drunk. Sometimes he would actually fall down, though on the plainest ground. He could not descend any steps without a great deal of trouble, and hardly durst stir out of his apartment. His hands shook terribly; it was with much difficulty he could write a few words, and those sadly scrawled. But he could dictate readily enough, though his tongue, which had never had any great volubility, began to have rather somewhat less. His memory was good, and the only thing that could make any detriment to his intellects to be suspected, was, that he was less attentive to the game of draughts, and that his countenance was a good deal altered. He had an appetite, and slept; but it was with difficulty he could turn himself in his bed.
It appeared to me, that his excesses with women and wine were the primary cause of his disorder, and I judged, that his straining in his trials of bodily strength might be the reason why his muscles were more particularly attacked. The season was rather unfavorable to the employment of remedies, and yet it was requisite, in the mean while, to stop the progress of the disease. I advised him frictions of the whole body, with flannel, and other corroboratives; proposing to myself to augment the doses with the adjunction of the cold-bath, in the beginning of the summer. At the end of some weeks the tremors of his hand appeared some what abated. In the month of April there was a conciliation held on him, in which his disorder was imputed to an accident of his having, about two years before, written, for some months, in a room newly plaistered and damp. Upon this there were applied warm baths, unctuous frictions, powders said to be diaphoretic and antispasmodic; but no alteration for the better followed. In the month of June, a second consultation decided for his going to the baths of Leuk, in Valais: he went, and on his return he had more tremors, and a greater stiffness. Since then (September, 1760) till the month of January 1764, I have not seen him above three or four times.
In 1762, on the credit of some advertisement, he sent for, from Frankfort, the medicines of the Onania, which did him no service. Last year, he took others from some foreign physician, but with as little success. His disorder had, from the beginning, made slow but daily advances, and many months before his death, he could no longer support himself on his legs, nor could he so much as move his hands or arms. The embarrassment of his tongue increased, and his voice failed him to such a degree, that there was no hearing easily what he said. The extensor muscles of the head let it continually fall on the breast. He had constantly an uneasiness in his back: his sleep and appetite successively diminished: the last months of his life he could hardly swallow any thing. Since Christmas an oppression came on him, with an irregular fever. His eyes grew dim in a singular manner. When I saw him again in the month of January, he used to pass the whole day, and a great part of the night, in an elbow-chair, leaning backward, his feet extended on a chair, his head falling down every instant on his breast, having always a person standing near him, and constantly employed in changing his attitude, lifting his head up to feed him, to give him snuff, to blow his nose; and to make out, by listening attentively, what he said. The last days of his life he was reduced to pronounce his words letter by letter, which were taken down in writing just as he could articulate them. Finding that I gave him no hopes, and that I only employed some lenitives for his oppression and fever, urged, at length, by a desire of living, he opened himself in, confidence to one of his friends, for his immediately acquainting me of it, as the cause to which he imputed all his illness, and which was his self-pollution, having begun that infamous practice many years ago, and continued it as long as he could; adding, that he had felt this disorder increase in proportion to his delivering himself up to it. This confession he confirmed to me some days afterward, and withal, that it was on this account that he had been determined to send for the medicines of the Onania.
Excess of venery does not only produce the languors of chronical diseases, but sometimes throws into acute ones, and always aggravates any disorders that proceed from other causes; it easily produces malignancies, which, in my opinion, are but a failure of the forces of nature.
Hippocrates, in his histories of epidemical diseases, has, of old, left us his observation on a young man, who, after excesses of wine and venery, was seized with a fever, accompanied by the most vexatious and irregular symptoms, and which proved mortal[46].
All that M. Hoffman says on this head deserves a reference to it. After having spoke of the danger of the pleasures of love, for wounded persons, he examines that of such as, having a fever, will nevertheless venture upon them. He begins by quoting an observation of Fabricius Hildanus, who says, that a man having had a commerce with a woman, the tenth day of a pleurisy, which had had a favourable crisis from a profuse sweat, was attacked with a violent fever and remarkable tremors, and died the thirteenth day. He gives you afterwards the history of a man of fifty years of age, gouty, and much addicted to venery and wine, who, in the first days of his recovery from a false pleurisy, was attacked, immediately after a coition, with a general tremor, an excessive flushing in the face, a fever, and all the symptoms of the disorder from which he was recovering, but much more violent than the first time, and was in a much greater danger. He tells you too of a man, who never indulged any venereal excesses without having, for many days afterwards, fits of an intermittent fever. He concludes with a case from Bartholinus, who saw a new-married man attacked, on the next morning of his wedding night, after conjugal excesses, with an acute fever, a great lowness of spirits, faintnesses, nauseas of the stomach, an immoderate thirst, lightness of head, want of sleep, and anxieties; but who was cured by rest and some restoratives[47].
M. Chesneau saw a young married couple, attacked, the first week of their wedding, with a violent continual fever, with a flushing in the face, which was also considerably swelled: both of them had a great pain in the small of their back, and both perished in a few days[48].
M. Vandermonde describes a fever produced by the same cause, a very tedious fever, and attended with the most dreadful symptoms, but of which the issue was more happy than in the case adduced by Hippocrates. I will not here recite the description of it, because of its length; but I earnestly recommend to physicians the reading it in the work itself, which is now easily to be come at any where. I shall subsequently and in another place speak of the method of cure.
M. de Sauvages describes this disorder under the title of the burning fever of the exhausted: the pulse is sometimes strong and full, at others weak and low. The urines are red, the skin dry and hot, the thirst considerable. They have nauseas, and cannot sleep[49].