“Too great a dissipation of the seminal humor weakens the springs of action in all the solids; thence arise weakness, laziness, listlessness, hectics, the tabes dorsalis, a torpor, and depravation of the senses, stupidity, madness, epilepsies, convulsions[29].”
M. Hoffman had already remarked, that young people who abandoned themselves to that shameful practice of self-pollution, “lost, little by little, the faculties of the understanding, especially the memory, and became intirely unapt for study[30].”
M. Lewis describes all these evils: but I shall only transcribe from his work, what relates to the detriment occasioned to the intellectual faculties.
“All the evils which arise from excesses committed with women, are also effected in early life, by that abominable practice in school-boys, a practice which I cannot describe in terms odious enough, pollutio sui, which, actuated more by vitiousness than by sense and reason, and ignorant of the mischievous consequences, they repeat, &c. &c.[31] ... So intimately are the mind and body blended together, that there cannot be any disease of the one which will not influence the other; but in none is the mind more deeply affected than in this. To add to his infelicity, a melancholy gloom attends the patient, and silence and solitude are anxiously sought after.—The chearful haunts of men no longer delight him; he is absent in company, and will have no part of the conversation. He is not happy even in his friend: a sense of his misfortune, and perhaps the aggravating circumstance of having brought it upon himself, for ever hang on his mind. The company of the female sex he loves indeed, but the apprehensions that he may be cut off from nuptial felicity, interrupts the fruition of their pleasing converse. Thus deeply dejected, he excludes himself from society, wanders in retirement, and it is well if he seeks not to destroy himself at last[32].”
Fresh observations, subsequently introduced, will confirm the truth of the preceding dreadful description. That one furnished by M. Storcke, in the valuable work which he has published on the history and cure of diseases, is not less terrible: but I refer the curious to the work itself, which no physician would wish to be without. The passage I allude to is in his Medicus annuus, T. ii. p. 215, &c. But before I terminate this Section, I shall here conclusively add a passage in that excellent work, with which M. Gaubius has lately enriched the medical art. He not only paints the evils, but points out the causes of them, with that force, that truth, that sagacity, that exactness, which can belong to none but so great a master. It is a most valuable extract; and that the coloring of it may appear in its true lustre, I subjoin to the translation the original of it, in the language of the author’s expression.
“An immoderate profusion of seed is pernicious, not only through the waste of that most useful humor, but also through the over-frequent repetition of that convulsive motion which is produced by the emission. For the highest pitch of that pleasure is immediately succeeded by so universal a relaxation of the animal strength, as cannot be borne often without a consequential enervity. The more frequent a draught there is on the secretory ducts of the body, the greater is the derivation of the respective humors of the secretions; so that in the case of the liquid being repeatedly attracted to the parts of generation, the rest of the secretions are depauperated: thence, from excesses of venery follow, weariness, weakness, immobility, a tottering gait, pains of the head, convulsions, a hebetation of all the senses, and especially of the sight, blindness, intellectual imbecillity, a feverish circulation, dryness, leanness, a phthisis, a tabes dorsalis, an effeminate habit of body. These evils are liable to augment and become incurable through that perpetual pruriency for venery which the mind does not less than the body at length contract; and from which it follows, that obscene imaginations haunt even the dreams of persons so affected, and that the parts prone to the libidinous turgescence are, on every occasion, impetuously sollicited, while the quantity of the repaired seminal fluid, were it never so small, occasions constantly a troublesome stimulation, and is ready to start from its relaxed repositories with any the least endeavour, or even without any endeavor at all. Whence it is clear why an excess of this nature is so capable of blasting the flower of youth[33].”
SECTION II.
Observations communicated.
I shall preserve no other order than that of the dates of my receiving these observations.