M. Hoffman has also preserved to us the history of a nun, who could not be recovered out of an hysterical paroxysm but by the excital of that evacuation. And Zacutus, in the same work I have just quoted, speaks of two men, to whose health the suppression of the pleasures of love was a detriment. The one was attacked with a swelling at the navel which no remedy could diminish, and which was dissipated on his marrying: the other, weakened by his debauches in that way, quitted them all on a sudden; six months afterwards he had vertigos, and soon afterwards some attacks of a real epilepsy, which were imputed to some disorders of his stomach. Accordingly they gave him stomachics, which exasperated his disorder, and he died in a violent fit of the epilepsy. On being opened, every thing was found in proper order, except the vesiculæ seminales and the vasa deferentia, which were found full of a sperm, green, and in some places ulcerous[135].
A Physician, respectable for his skill and for his age, and who long attended the Austrian armies in Italy, told me, he had remarked, that those German soldiers who were not married, and who lived chastely, were often attacked with fits of epilepsy, priapisms, or nocturnal pollutions; accidents which proceeded from an over-abundant secretion of the seminal liquid; which perhaps too had the more stimulative acridity from the heat of the country, where the diet is also more rich.
We have from the same Dr. Jaques, whom I have quoted in the second Article of this work, a thesis[136], of which M. de la Mettrie has given a translation[137], in which he adduces many examples of diseases produced by a privation of the pleasures of venery; and M. de la Mettrie mentions another work upon cloistered virginity, of which the object is the same.
M. Zindel published at Basle, about fifteen years ago, a dissertation, in which he has collected together, scattered observations on the diseases produced by too rigid a chastity[138]. And here may be placed what M. de Sauvages says of the dangers of a rigorous chastity to those women with whose constitutions it does not agree; they are so much the more the victims of the warmth of it, the more careful they are to conceal it; they pine, and fall into melancholy, disrelish of life, emaciation, and pollutions. He adds a case, which furnishes perhaps an example of the severest trial to which a conflict of constitution and virtue could expose the party distracted between them: it is that of a young girl, who, devoured with a raging fire, and yet preserving her soul pure, with an astonishing fortitude was subject to pollutions even in those moments in which she was deploring her misfortune at the feet of her confessor, a decrepid, loathsome old man.[139]
“A young girl, who marries an old husband” (said a new married woman to her female friend) “had better throw herself into the river, with a mill-stone about her neck.”
In short, not to mention many others, M. Gaubius places excessive continency in the class of causes of diseases. “It is rare, indeed, (he says,) that it produces any evils, and yet it has been known so to do, in some men, born with a warm constitution, and who breed a great deal of the seminal liquid, and in some women[140].” And he proceeds to an enumeration of those disorders. The existence then of them is not to be denied; but the rarity of them may at the same time be affirmed, especially in the present age, which seems to be the age of sensuality: and, in truth, we see every day that gross mistake committed, of attributing indistinctly to this cause, that is to say, to a need of employment for the organs of generation, all the diseases which attack marriageable persons of both sexes, and in advising marriage to them as the only remedy; a remedy often misjudged, often even noxious, because it cannot destroy the complaints which proceed from other causes of disorder, and may add to such evils, those which pregnancy and lying-in commonly produce in persons of a languishing state of health. I return to the subject of pollutions.
I have shown, that the first kind of them, produced by that over-abundance of the seminal liquid, which it lessens by evacuation, is not of itself an evil; but it may become one by recurring too frequently, and at times when the over-abundance no longer exists. I have also already observed, that one evacuation disposed for a second, and so on, so great is the force of habit, which consists in this, that the reiteration of the same motions gives them the greater facility, insomuch that they reproduce themselves on the slightest cause; an observation of great use towards the understanding the animal œconomy, upon which Galen, and especially M. Maty[141], have said some excellent things; and still it has not been treated of to the bottom. From the habit then there results this inconveniency, that these evacuations become a consequence of it, independently of the want, and when it no longer exists. Then they are extremely pernicious, and have all the dangers of an excessive evacuation procured by other means. Satyrus surnamed Gragropilex, residing at Thasus, had had, from the age of twenty-five, frequent nocturnal pollutions: nay, sometimes the liquid would come from him in the day time. He died of a consumption in his thirtieth year[142].
M. Zimmerman told me of a man of a remarkably fine genius, to whom pollutions had caused the loss of all the activity of his understanding, and whose body was exactly in that condition described by Boerhaave (Section I.) In that Section too may be seen the evils which Hoffman observed consequential to pollutions. The most common symptoms, when the disorder has not as yet made any great progress, are, a continual oppression, most considerable in the morning, and acute pains of the loins. Some months ago I was consulted about a laborer in the vines, aged about fifty years, before that time very robust, but whom frequent pollutions had, for three or four months, so prodigiously weakened, that he could not work but a few hours a day. Often he was even totally debarred from it by pains in his loins, which confined him to his bed, and he every day grew leaner. I gave him some advice, of which I could not learn the execution or effect.
I knew a man who had become deaf for some weeks on his neglecting a cold, and who, on his having a nocturnal pollution, was, the next day, much deafer than ordinary, with great restlessness and anxiety; and another, whose weakness was owing to many causes, and who, after a pollution, wakes under the greatest oppression, and with so general a numbness, that he is for an hour like a paralytic, and remains the whole day after under a great dejection.
In this first class may be put the pollutions of those, who, having been accustomed to frequent emissions, suddenly suspend them. Such were those of a woman whom Galen makes mention; she had been, for some time, in the state of widow-hood, and the retention of the spermatic liquid brought upon her disorders of the uterus. In her sleep she had convulsive motions of her loins, arms, and legs, which were accompanied with an abundant emission of a thick matter, with the same sensations as in the act of coition[143]. A female dancer had received accidentally a slight hurt near her left breast; her surgeon prescribed to her rather a strict diet, and especially forbad her those pleasures to which she was pretty much accustomed. The third night of the privation, to which she had submitted without minding the injunctions of diet, she had a pollution, which returning several times the following nights, made her visibly fall away, and caused to her violent pains of the loins. Her wound, however, did not fail of healing, in a great measure, and would have been quite so, if she had been observant of the surgeon’s rules of diet, who, firm in the principles of his art, continued his prohibition of venery, and bled and purged her. Wearied out, at length, and weakened, she left off his remedies, and, resuming her usual course of life, her weakness and her pains quickly went off.