Читать книгу A Treatise on the Crime of Onan - S. A. D. Tissot - Страница 8

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Since the publication of this work, I have learnt, from a very respectable quarter, that an entire faith ought not to be given to the English collection, and that this reason, together with certain calumnies, some obscenities, and the forgery of an imperial privilege, had made the German translation be prohibited in the Empire. These motives would have determined me to suppress all that I had extracted from that work, but some considerations have induced me to preserve it, under the modification of this præ-advertisement. The first is, that some of these reasons concern only the German edition. Another is, that though there may be some facts invented, as indeed some of them plainly enough appear to carry with them a stamp of falsity, it is yet proved, that the greatest number of them are but too true. In short, a third consideration which determined me, is what I find in the above-mentioned letter of M. Stehelin. “I have (says he) received a letter from M. Hoffman of Maestrich, in which he acquaints me of his having seen a practiser of self-pollution, who had already drawn on himself a tabes dorsalis, which he had, without success, attempted to cure, and the patient was afterwards cured by the remedies of the Onania, of which Dr. Beckers of London is supposeably the author, and so well cured, that he has recovered his corpulence, is strong and healthy, and has four children.”

The English book of Onania is a perfect chaos, and the most indigested work that has been produced a long time. It is only the observations that can bear reading. All the reflections of the author, whom I could not believe a physician, are nothing but theological or moral trivialisms. I shall not extract from all this work, which is rather of the longest, any thing but a description of the most common accidents, of which the patients complain. The vivacity, the pathetic expressions of pain and repentance, which are found in a few of the letters in that book, I omit in this extract; but the want of them ought not to weaken the impression of horror which the reading of the facts themselves should inspire, as it is on the facts that the impression depends; and the readers will rather have to thank me for sparing him the perusal of a much greater number of others, without order or diction. I shall class under six heads those evils of which the English patients complain, and begin with the most grievous, those of the soul.

First. All the intellectual faculties are weakened; the memory fails; the ideas are confused or clouded; the patients sometimes even fall into a slight degree of insanity; they are continually under a kind of inward restlessness, and feel a constant anguish, with such pangs of confidence and remorse, as make them shed tears in bitterness of heart. They are subject to giddiness; all the senses, and especially those of seeing and hearing, grow weaker and weaker; their sleep, if sleep they can, is disturbed by disagreeable or frightful dreams.

2. The bodily strength entirely fails; the growth of those who have not done growing, and who abandon themselves to this detestable practice, is considerably checked. Some can get no sleep at all, others are in a state of continual dozing. All of them almost become hypochondriacs, or hysteric, and are overwhelmed with all the evils that attend those dreadful disorders; melancholy, sighs, tears, palpitations; suffocations, fainting fits. Some have been known to spit calcarious matter. Coughs, a slow fever, consumptions, are the punishments which some find in their own crimes.

3. The most acute pains are another subject of complaint in the patients. One complains of his head, another of his breast, the stomach, the intestines, aches of external rheumatisms; some are affected with an obtuse sensation of pain in all the parts of the body, on the slightest impression.

4. There are not only to be seen pimples on the face, which is one of the commonest symptoms, but even blotches, or suppurative pustules, on the face, nose, breast, thighs, with cruel itchings on those parts. Nay, one patient complained of fleshy excrescences on his forehead.

5. The organs of generation come in also for their share of the sufferings, of which they are themselves the primary cause. Many patients become incapable of erection; in others, the seminal humor comes away in the moment of the slightest stimulation, and of the weakest erection; some will even evacuate it on going to stool. Numbers are attacked with an habitual gonorrhœa, which intirely destroys constitutional vigor, and the matter of it resembles a fetid sanies, or foul mucosity. Others are tormented with painful priapisms. Dysuries, stranguries, heat of urine, a weakening of its spirt, put the patients to cruel inconveniences and pains. Some have very painful tumors in the testicles, in the penis, the bladder, the spermatic string. In short, either the impossibility of coition, or the depravation of the seminal humor, renders incapable of procreation almost all those who have long abandoned themselves to this crime.

6. The functions of the intestines are sometimes totally disordered, and some patients complain of an obstinate costiveness, others of the piles, or of the running of a fetid matter from the fundament.

This last observation reminds me of a young man, who, after every act of self-pollution, was attacked with a diarrhœa, which must be an additional cause of a diminution of strength to him.