These attestations of the most authoritative among the antients, are confirmed by a crowd among the moderns.
Sanctorius, who has, with the greatest accuracy, examined all the causes that act upon the human body, has observed, that this one weakened the stomach, ruined the digestions, hindered the insensible perspiration, the interruptions or disorders of which are attended with such bad consequences, produced a heat in the liver and kidneys, disposed for the stone, diminished the natural heat, and commonly drew after it a weakness of the eyes[12].
Lommius, in his excellent Commentaries on the passage I have quoted from Celsus, seconds the testimonies of his author, with his own observations. “Too frequent emissions (says he) of the seminal liquid relax, drain, weaken, enervate, and produce a multitude of evils; apoplexies, lethargies, epilepsies, a dozingness, maladies of the eyes, loss of sight, tremors, palsies, convulsions, and of all the kinds of gout, the most painful one[13].”
There is no reading without horror, the description left us by Tulpius, that celebrated Burgomaster and Physician of Amsterdam. “Not only (says he) the spinal marrow wastes away, but both body and mind languish alike; the individual perishes miserably. Samuel Vespretius was attacked with the defluxion of an excessively acrid humor, which first seized the back part of his head and the nape of his neck: thence it passed to the spine, the loins, the haunches, and the joints of the thigh, occasioning to the unhappy patient such acute pains and tortures, that he became totally disfigured, and fell into a slow fever, that kept consuming him, but not so fast as he could have wished, his condition being so intolerable, that he frequently invoked death before it came to his deliverance from his sufferings[14].”
Nothing (says a celebrated Physician of Louvain) so much weakens the vital faculties, and abridges life[15].
Blancard had seen simple gonorrhœas, consumptions, and dropsies all acknowledging this cause[16].
Muys had seen a man as yet unbroken with age, attacked with a spontaneous gangrene in the foot, which he attributed to venereal excesses[17].
The Memoirs of curious Naturalists mention the circumstance of a loss of sight, the observation of which deserves a recital at large. “It is (says the author) unconceivable, what a sympathy the repositories of the seminal humor have with the whole body, but especially with the eyes. Salmuth saw a learned hypochondriac run raving mad, and another man, whose brain was so dried up, that it might be heard shaking as it were loose within the skull; both owing to their having abandoned themselves to excesses of venery. I myself saw a man of fifty-nine years of age, who, three weeks after marriage with a young woman, fell into sudden blindness, and died at the end of four months[18].”
The over-dissipation of the animal spirits weakens the stomach, palls the appetite, and nutrition no longer proceeding in its due course or degree, all the parts languish, and an epilepsy is sometimes the consequence[19].
We cannot, it is true, say that the animal spirits and the seminal humor are the same thing, but observation has taught us, as will be subsequently seen, that these two fluids have a great affinity.