ARTICLE I.
The Symptoms.
SECTION I.
Description drawn from the Works of Physicians.
Hippocrates, the most antient and the most exact of all the observers of Nature, has already described the evils produced by excessive venery, under the name of the Dorsal Consumption, in Latin, Tabes dorsalis[4].—“This disease (says he) proceeds from the spinal marrow. It attacks young married folks, or those addicted to lustful excesses. They have no fever, and though they eat as much as usual, they turn lean, and waste away. They imagine they feel something, as it were like ants, descending from the head, and creeping down the back-bone. In their evacuations by stool or urine, they lose abundance of the seminal liquid much thinner than it naturally is. They are unfit for generation, and are often busied in the act of it, in their dreams. Walking, especially in any bad road, soon puts them out of breath, weakens them, brings on heavinesses of head; they have a kind of tingling in their ears; at length an acute fever (lypiria) terminates their days.”
Some Physicians have attributed to the same cause, a disease which Hippocrates describes elsewhere[5], and which has some affinity to the first: this last they call “the secondary tabes dorsalis.” But the continuance under it of the bodily strength, which he particularly specifies, appears to me a convincing proof, that this last disease does not acknowledge the same cause as the first. It seems rather a rheumatic affection. For example, Celsus, in his excellent book on the preservation of health, says, “the pleasures of coition are always pernicious to weak constitutions, and the frequent use of them enfeebles the strong.[6]”
Nothing can be conceived more dreadful than the description which Aretæus has left us of the evils produced by an over-abundant evacuation of that humor. “The young (says he) contract the looks and the infirmities of old age; they become pale, effeminate, torpid, inactive, stupid, and even drivellers; their bodies are bent, their legs refuse their office; they have a general distaste, and grow unfit for all the offices of life; many fall into a palsy[7].” In another place he sets down the pleasures of venery among the six causes that produce the palsy.
Galen has seen the same cause produce diseases of the brain and nerves, and destroy the vital force[8].
He says in another place, that a man who was not thoroughly recovered of a violent disorder, died on the same night that he acquitted himself of the nuptial function with his wife.[9]
Pliny the Naturalist tells us, that Cornelius Gallus, a Prætor advanced in years, and Titus Ætherius, died in the act itself of coition.[10]
“The stomach (says Ætius) is weakened; the transgressor falls into a paleness, leanness, dryness; his eyes are hollowed in his head[11].”