In 1761 and 1762 I saw two young men both very healthy, very strong, and vigorous, who were attacked, the one on the next morning the other on the next night of their respective weddings, with a violent fever, without any shudder, their pulse quick and hard, lightness of head, many slight convulsive motions, an intolerable restlessness, and the skin very dry. The second was extremely thirsty, and made water with great difficulty. I imagined, at first, that an excess of wine might have some share in these accidents, but I was fully convinced to the contrary, at least by the second. They were both of them cured in about two days time, a circumstance, which, joined to the epoch of their disorder, and to its symptoms, leaves no doubt about the cause of it.
Careful observations and sad experience have taught me, that acute disorders were always very dangerous in persons accustomed to self-pollution; their progress is commonly irregular, their symptoms unaccountable, their periods interverted. The constitution affords no resources; Art is obliged to do every thing, and as it never procures perfect Crises, when, after a great deal of pains, the disease is got under, the patient remains rather in a state of languor than of recovery, which exacts a continuation of the most assiduous care, to hinder him from falling into some chronical disorder.
I find that Fonseca has already stated this danger. “Many young persons (says he) and those very robust ones, are either attacked, after excesses with women, on the same night, with an acute fever that kills them, or fall into grievous disorders, of which they find it a difficult matter to be cured; for when the body is weakened by venereal excesses, if it should be attacked with an acute distemper, there is no remedy[50].”
A young lad, not quite sixteen, had abandoned himself to self-pollution, with such a rage, that, at length, instead of seed, he only brought blood, of which the emission was soon followed by excessive pains, and by an inflammation of all the organs of generation. Happening to be in the country, I was consulted. I ordered extremely emollient cataplasms, which produced the effect I expected from them: but I have since learnt, that he died soon after of the small-pox; and do not in the least doubt of the hurt he did his constitution by the fury of that infamous practice, having much contributed to render that distemper mortal. What a warning should not this be to young people!
All those who have sometimes occasion to have the venereal disorder under their cure, know that it frequently becomes mortal, in such as have had their constitution impaired or worn out by frequency of debauchery. I have seen the most deplorable objects in that way.
SECTION V.
Consequences of self-pollution to the female sex.
The preceding observations appear, all of them (except that from Mr. Stehelin, which concludes the second Section,) to concern principally the men: but it would be an essential imperfection, in a treatise on this subject, to omit an admonition to the female sex, of their exposing themselves to the same dangers, on their pursuing the same depraved course. There are numerous examples of their having drawn upon themselves all the evils I have set forth, and women but too often perish miserably the victims of this detestable lewdness. The English treatise upon Onania is full of confessions of this kind, which there is no reading without being seized with horror and compassion; the malignity of the disorders occasioned by it, seems even to have a superior degree of activity among the women, to what it has among the men.
Besides the symptoms which I have already described, the women are particularly exposed to hysteric fits, or dreadful vaporous affections; to incurable jaundices, to cruel cramps of the stomach and back; to sharp prickings of the nose, to the fluor albus, of which the acridity is a perpetual source of the most torturous pains; to the procidentia, and ulcerations of the womb, and to all the infirmities which are the consequences of these two disorders; to elongations of the clitoris, and eruptions on it; to the furor uterinus, which, depriving them at once of modesty and reason, puts them on a level with the most lascivious brutes, till a desperate death delivers them from pain and infamy.
The face, that faithful mirror of the intellectual and bodily affections, is the first to give outward signs of the inward disorders. Then that plumpness, that fresh color, whose union constitutes that air of youth, which alone can supply the place of beauty, and without which beauty itself can produce no other impression than that of a cold unconcerned admiration; that plumpness, I say, that fresh color, are the first to fade away and disappear: leanness, a sallow complexion, a coarseness of the skin succeed immediately to them; the eyes lose their lustre, tarnish, and express, in their languor, that of the whole machine, the lips lose their vermilion, the teeth their whiteness; in short, it is not rare that the whole figure receives a considerable damage by the total deformation of the shape.
The Rickets is a disorder, as to which Boerhaave is mistaken, when he says, it does not attack persons after the age of three years. It is not uncommon to see young people of both sexes, but especially the female, who, after their having been well-shaped to the age of eight, ten, twelve, or fourteen, and even sixteen years, fall, little by little, into a distortion of shape, through the curvature of the spine; and this disorder sometimes becomes very considerable. It is not here the place for entering into particulars of this ailment, nor into an enumeration of the causes which produce it. Hippocrates has pointed out two[51]. I shall have, perhaps, occasion of communicating, in another work, what several observations have taught me on that subject; but what I ought not to omit here, is, that self-pollution holds the first rank among the causes that produce it.