CHAPTER VII.
DEFECTS AND DEFICIENCIES.
The approach to new relations and untried conditions often awakens in the minds of the unmarried apprehensions which are entitled at least to a brief consideration at this place.
Many young men who are looking forward to marriage spend months of anxious forethought lest there should exist in them some physical incapacity which might unfit them for the new relation into which they are about to enter. Such fears, in the vast majority of cases, are wholly groundless, and in the exceptional instances the insufficiency is generally more seeming than real. Where the previous life has been correct and virtuous there is not more than one case in a thousand where any serious embarrassment may reasonably be expected to arise.
Because of a lack of nourishing food, the neglect of exercise and physical culture, excessive overwork, dissipation and late hours, many young men suffer from sexual weakness and become apprehensive of impotence, and when they contemplate marriage resort to stimulants, or the most foolish expedients, for regaining or testing their sexual power. No more foolish or destructive course could be pursued. The right thing to do is to inquire into the influences which have produced the debility, remove the cause, resort to such indoor and out-of-door exercises as will tend to the best development of the physical man, restore health, increase the ordinary powers of endurance, and then the apprehensions will all disappear.
Physical weakness and general debility, when emphasized by the nervous strain of the ordinary marriage occasion and followed by the excitement inseparable from the earliest marital relation, often result in premature sexual loss and temporary departure of erectile power, and beget apprehension, and even awaken fear.
But even where such instances do occur, they are usually only temporary. Actual impotence during a period of manhood is very rare. Where there is ground for just apprehension the young man should always consult an intelligent and conscientious physician. If he suggests either stimulants or association with dissolute women in order to test your powers, in order to strengthen the reproductive system, accept this as a sufficient evidence of his incompetency, and immorality as well, and betake yourself to another physician. The world has passed on to that period when a practitioner who is so ignorant as to give such dangerous and destructive advice is unworthy of the confidence of the people upon whose credulity and purses he preys, and also of the respect of decent people, or a place among intelligent physicians.
Any young man who has several months remaining before marriage can easily remove all groundless apprehensions by such a full observance of the laws of health, due exercise in the open air, the use of dumb-bells, Indian-clubs and home Exercisers as will develop his physical powers and enable him to come to a just apprehension of his real condition.
Nor need a young man who has selected a bride in good health and in appropriate physical proportions to himself feel any anxieties concerning the deficiencies or deformities in her. Medical authorities affirm that the obstacles to the consummation of marriage are far less frequent in females than in males. The greatest barriers to a proper entrance upon marriage upon the part of men are found in excessive solitary and social vice, and especially in the results which attend and follow venereal diseases, all of which exert a debilitating effect upon the masculine function.