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Tissot
(1781). On Onania or A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation.
"'Sperm is ... the end-product of all digestions.' and 'essential ointment,'
the 'leading liqueur' as termed by Tissot, which contains this vital force
that animates the body ... Tissot quotes aristotle, who considered sperm
as "the excretion from the ultimate food, or to put it more clearly, as
the most perfected components of our foods.' Concerning the pathogenic
aspect, Tissot refers his readers to Galen who wrote that 'losing sperm
amounts to losing the vital spirits'"
...Spermatorrhea ... is in our own history... [It is described] in Diseases
II by the Hippocratic authors under the name of 'consumptions of the
back' (Bottero,
1991: 312-3).
"Dangers
of semen loss dominates Euro-American minds. Even Freud attributed neurasthenia
- a neurosis - to "immoderate masturbation or spontaneous emission." In
1912, he also challenges Stekel's "truly modern view that seminal loss
has no pernicious effects on brain functioning..." (Bottero,
1991: 313). Interest in neurasthenia continued late into the twentieth
century and the condition found a place in all editions of the International
Classification of Diseases (ICD) till the ninth revision. Psychiatrists
in the Indian subcontinent were classifying Dhat Syndrome in this category
until the tenth revision of the ICD accorded a separate category for it
in the classificatory system" (Raguram,
et al., 1994: 122).
Semen
Loss in Nineteenth-Century England:"It was a period of medical terrorism
when drastic measures like surgery, physical restraint, severe punishment
and fright influenced most treatments for semen loss... Many famous psychiatrists
of the time, including Henry Maudley, held the view that semen loss especially
if it occurs through masturbation, results in mental illness"
(Raguram,
et al., 1994: 121).
Semen
Loss in America: "As sensational report on idiocy was presented
to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1848 by the superintendent of
the lunatic asylum at Worcester, who claimed that 32 percent of admissions
to the hospital were insane because of semen loss, either spontaneous or
through masturbation" (Raguram,
et al., 1994: 122). "The anti-mastubation furor escalated and reached
its apogee in the 1870s and '80s in the writings of John Harvey Kellogg,
M.D.... [who] died in 1943 at the age of 91, without retracting any
of his absurd pronouncements" (Money,
1995: 29). Circumcision as anti-masturbation endeavor (Money,
1989).
France
- Fin-de-siècle: "Energy distribution, in French physiology,
created further dangers to the reproductive success of the bourgeois. Theories
of energy/depletion (new versions of ancient vitalism) envisioned strength
and vitality as available to any organism in only limited quantities. Overexertion
of any kind, but especially sexual, was seen as a real danger to males,
who were thus advised to ration their sperm. Men were cautioned too that
women, by their very essence, were incompletely energized and sought to
possess male energy through the absorption of sperm. Thus the imperative
that females be chaste takes on medical meaning"
(Hildreth,
1996: 151).
Sexism:
"Victorian theorists of anti-sexualism took for granted the inequality
of the sexes and the superior power of the male who, therefore, had more
to lose if he lost his semen. Moreover, the fact that the female had no
semen to lose if she masturbated was evidence of her inferiority - such
was the circularity of their reasoning".
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