Young persons ought never to be left alone with masters liable to any suspicion; and all intercourse should be forbidden with the servants.
It is not long since that a girl of about eighteen years of age, who had enjoyed a very good health, fell into an astonishing weakness; her strength decayed daily; she was all the day stupified with a kind of dozing, and all night tormented with a want of sleep, her appetite was gone, and œdematous swellings spread over her whole body. She consulted an able surgeon, who, having satisfied himself of there having been no disorder in the menstrual flux, suspected self-pollution. The effect of his first question confirmed to him the justness of his suspicion, and the confession of the patient converted it to a certainty. He made her sensible of the danger of this practice, a cessation of which, and some remedies, stopped, in a few days, the progress of the evil, and even produced some amendment of health.
Besides self-pollution, manual or instrumental, there is another defilement, or contamination, which may be termed clitoridian, of which the known origin is traced up to the second Sappho.
Lesbiades, infamem quæ me fecistis, amatæ.
A vice too common among the Roman women, from that epoch at which the general dissoluteness of morals began, and which was more than once the object of the epigrams and satires of those times.
Lenonum ancillas posita Laufella corona
Provocat, et tollit pendentis præmia coxæ.
Ipsa Medullina frictum crissantis adorat.
Palmam inter Dominas virtus natalibus æquat.[53]
Nature, in her sportive indulgence to variety, gives to some women a degree of resemblance to men, which, for want of sufficient examination, has, for ages, obtained a belief of that chimæra of Hermaphrodites. The supernatural size of a part which is commonly a very small one of the female organ of generation, and upon which M. Tronchin has given a learned dissertation, constitutes the whole wonder, as the odious abuse of that part does the whole ill. Vain, perhaps, of this sort of resemblance, there have been some of these imperfect women, who have usurped the functions of virility. The Greeks call them Tribades. They are a sort of monstrous beings too frequent, and which seduce the young of the fair sex with the more facility, for their having in their favor, that reason for loving eunuchs, which Juvenal imputes to some women,