“I have also seen a young man seized with a tabes dorsalis. He had been an extremely pretty figure, and though he had been often admonished against the over-indulgence of venery, he would still abandon himself to it, and became so deformed before his death, that all that muscular roundness, which appears over the spinal apophyses of the loins, was entirely sunk and flattened. In this case the brain seems to be consumed, and, in fact, the patients become stupid. The body loses all its suppleness to such a degree, that I never saw such immobility produced by any other cause. The eyes also contract a notable dimness, or difficulty of seeing[25].”
M. de Senac, in his first edition of his Essays, set forth the dangers of self-pollution, and denounced to the victims of this infamy all the infirmities of the most languishing old age, in the flower of their youth. In the following editions may be seen his reasons for the suppression of this passage, and of some others.
Mr. Ludwig, in his description of the evils attending over-abundant evacuations, does not forget the seminal one.
“The young (says he) of either sex, who abandon themselves to lasciviousness, ruin their health, by a dissipation of that strength which by nature was designed to bring their body to its greatest point of vigor. In short, they fall into a consumption[26].”
M. de Gorter enters into particulars of the most dreadful accidents deriving from this cause; but as it would be of too great a length to copy him, I refer to his work those who understand the language in which he wrote[27].
M. Van Swieten, after a recital of the above-quoted description of the tabes dorsalis by Hippocrates, adds:
“I have seen all these symptoms, besides many more, befall those who had abandoned themselves to the infamy of self-pollutions. During three years, I employed, in vain, all the aids of the medical art, for a young man, who, by this vile habit, had brought on himself erratic, surprizing, and general pains, with a sensation sometimes of heat, sometimes of a very irksome cold all over his body, but especially towards the loins. These pains having, afterwards, been a little diminished, he felt so great a cold in his thighs and legs, although those parts seemed to the touch to have preserved their natural warmth, that he was continually warming himself at the fire, even during the greatest heats of the summer. But what more particularly astonished me, was a continual motion of rotation in the testicles, and the patient complained grievously of a like motion which he felt in his loins[28].”
This narration does not inform us whether this wretched object terminated his life at the end of the three years, or, what is worse, yet continued to languish on, for some time longer; for there could hardly be a third issue.
M. Kloekoff, in a very good work on those distempers of the mind which depend on the body, confirms, by his observations, what has been here advanced on this subject.