SECTION XII.
The Gleet, or simple Gonorrhœa.
“The Gonorrhœa (says Galen, who knew none but the simple one) is a running of the seed without erection.” Many authors, in all ages, make mention of it, and Moses, the most antient of all. In the observations of Hippocrates may be seen the example of a Mountaineer, whose disorder seems to have been a marasmus, and who had an involuntary evacuation of the urine and seminal liquid[149]. M. Boerhaave seems, however, as to the seminal efflux, to have set down this disorder among the number of doubtful things. “You may (says he) read in books of physic, that the seed has sometimes run, without its being perceived or felt. But this disorder must be extremely rare, as I know of no instance in the which the seed has come out without some degree of titillation: or else it was not the true seminal liquid separated in the testicles, and amassed in the seminal vesicules, though I have seen the liquid of the prostatæ flow forth[150].” This authority is, doubtless, very respectable; but besides that M. Boerhaave does not decisively pronounce on this point, he has against him all the Physicians; and, not to go out of his own school, one of his most illustrious disciples, Gaubius, admits the evacuation of the seed without sensation. My own observations leave me no room to doubt of the existence of both the one and the other disorder. I have seen men who, after a virulent gonorrhœa, after excesses of venery, or self-pollutions, had a constant running at the yard, but which did not render them incapable of erection and ejaculation; they even complained, that a single ejaculation weakened them more than a running of some weeks; which is an evident proof that the liquid of these two evacuations was not the same; and that that which comes by a gonorrhœa flows only from the prostatæ, from some other glands about the urethra, from the follicular cellules distributed over its whole length, or, in short, from the dilated exhaling vessels. I have seen other men, who, like the first, had a continual running, but a running which weakened them much more, and which rendered them incapable of all venereal pruriency, of all erection, and, from that very circumstance, of all ejaculation, though the testicles had no appearance of any disqualification for their functions. It seems to me demonstrated, that, in these last, the true testicular semen came away without sensation. Those then who know the structure of the parts of generation, will easily bring themselves to believe, that the first case must be much more frequent than the last; but of the last they will also readily conceive the possibility of existence. The authors of the greatest exactness have called that the true gonorrhœa, in which they apprehended that the matter of the running was the genuine semen; the other they termed the spurious or catarrhal gonorrhœa.
The dangers of the genuine running are very considerable. In the beginning of the first Section, On the Symptoms, the description by Aretæus has been quoted. “How (says he, in the same place) can one avoid the being weakened, when that which is so essential to the vital forces is continually slipping away, in waste. It is in the seminal liquid alone that eminently resides the strength of man.”
Celsus, who lived before the times of Aretæus, says positively, “That the running of the seed without venereal sensation, brings on a consumption[151].”
John, son of Zacharias, more commonly known by the name of Actuarius, in a work which he composed for the service of the Ambassador whom the Emperor of Constantinople was sending to the North, is, upon this point, of the same opinion with the authors I have already quoted. “If (says he) the running of the seed, which proceeds without erection, and without sensation, sails for any time, it produces necessarily a consumption and death; for the most balsamic part of the humors and the animal spirits are thereby dissipated and lost[152].”
Some of the most modern authors agree also, on this head, with the antients. “The whole body (says Sennertus) becomes emaciated, and especially the back; the patients grow weaker and weaker; they languish; they have pains in the loins; they turn hollow-eyed[153].”
Boerhaave ranks this gonorrhœa among the causes of the palsy; and it may be remarked, that he admits in this place a gonorrhœa of pure seed. “The palsy (says he) which comes from a gonorrhœa, is incurable, because the body is exhausted[154].”
On this matter there may also, in an excellent dissertation of M. Koempf, be found some interesting observations[155].