In the opening lecture of this course, I remarked to you, gentlemen,
that the scope of Medical Jurisprudence is much wider than that of
Medical Law. It embraces many subjects of which human laws take no
cognizance, and in particular such vicious actions as do not violate the
rights of others, but are injurious to those only who practise them.
They undermine the health and shorten the lives of the guilty parties,
and bring in their train diseases the most destructive and often the
most incurable. It is the physician's beneficent task to lessen the
weaknesses and sufferings of the body, and to prolong human life in
well-preserved vigor to a green old age. It is not the least important
part of his valuable services to provide for the sound and vigorous
propagation of the human race to future generations. Of this propagation
of our race, of the laws which govern it, and of the criminal abuses by
which these laws are violated, I am to treat in this present lecture. My
subject is "Venereal Excesses."
I. If a physician's purpose were only to make money, his task would then
be to multiply diseases and infirmities; he would then be as great a
curse to mankind as he is really intended to be a blessing; and an
immense blessing he will be to his fellow-men if he studies to remove
even the remote causes of diseases and untimely deaths. He can do so in
a variety of ways and not the least by providing against sexual excesses
and abuses. These are a copious fountain of ill to humanity. A host of
diseases, such as tuberculosis, diabetes, cardial and nervous
affections, epilepsy, hysteria, general debility, weaknesses of sight,
languor and general worthlessness, hypochondria, weakness and total loss
of reason, and, in married life, impotence and sterility are some of the
effects of venereal excesses. Any excitement of the sexual passion
before the body has received its full development is more or less
injurious to its welfare; and all excesses or unnatural indulgence of it
at any period of life is pregnant with deplorable consequences. Now,
such evil practices are too much overlooked by many physicians; yet it
is certain that thousands of patients might, by timely warning on these
matters, be saved from unspeakable mental and physical sufferings. To
give sensible and intelligible directions on a subject as delicate as it
is important in medical practice, it will be necessary to enter into
some scientific details.
The passion which prompts to sexual intercourse is altogether natural in
itself, and, as such, intended by the Creator to be indulged in at the
right time and in the proper manner. It is the stimulus which He has
provided for the propagation of the human race. If the stimulus is
strong at times, this too is a special effect of His wisdom; because
without a powerful prompting of this kind, most men would shirk the
burden of married life, just as very many would not care to toil if they
had no hunger and thirst and other bodily wants to satisfy.
But though all these cravings are useful and even indispensable to
mankind, all of them need the regulation of reason. When they are
indulged immoderately or in unnatural ways, they become most copious
sources of bodily diseases, of mental disorders, and moral degradation.
Every one knows how the passion of drink, when abused, proves the
ruination of millions; excessive eating, too, injures the systems of
countless people. But no animal passion is more liable to become
disorderly, none needs more firm control and habitual watchfulness, than
the passion of lust. Reason dictates that it should be indulged for no
other purpose than that for which the Creator has made it, namely,
marital intercourse. I say _marital_ and not merely sexual intercourse;
for outside of married life all nations have always condemned its
indulgence.
Besides, it is only in the married state that the children, which are
the fruit of such intercourse, can be properly educated. To generate a
race of young barbarians is certainly not the purpose of the sexual
relations. Children must not be begotten unless they can be properly
raised, in a manner worthy of their noble destiny. Now, it is only in
the married state, in the family or domestic society, that they can be
thus educated. They need the tender hand of a mother to supply their
material wants; they need the manly care of a devoted father to provide
the necessaries of life, his firm hand to break their wanton wills, and
his wise direction to set them well on the road to temporal and eternal
happiness. Therefore, no one has the right to beget or to bear children
except in marital life. Now, the sexual passion is to be exercised only
in connection with its proper object, the procreation of children and
the fostering of such mutual love between husband and wife as is
conducive to domestic happiness. Therefore this passion is to be kept
under careful and rational constraint. This the law of morality
requires; all nations have ever exacted that this passion shall be
subject to established rules; no free-love has ever been tolerated where
there was the least pretence to civilization, and I do not know that it
was ever permitted even among barbarians.
Even the distant approach that Mormonism made towards free-love has been
absolutely condemned and repressed by the common-sense of the American
people, as incompatible with civilization. In fact, all history
testifies that the true civilization of any race or country rises or
falls with the restraints imposed on the passion of lust; no polygamous
nation has ever been more than half-civilized. The greatness of Rome and
Greece decayed when the laws of social purity declined; and in our own
day the immorality of what is called "the social evil" is the darkest
stain on modern civilization.
And what we say of civilization or social soundness, the soundness of
the body politic, applies in a great measure to individual soundness,
the health of every person's mind and body. Personal purity promotes
health and vigor, it lends beauty to form, gives a keen edge to the
intellect, adds energy and brings success to manhood, and prepares for
enduring and honored old age. Venereal excesses, on the contrary,
undermine the vigor of the constitution, bring on a host of bodily
infirmities, exhaust the system before the proper time, debauch and
degrade the mind and will, and prepare their victims for an early grave
or a decrepit old age.
II. But how can a passion so ardent be properly restrained? In
particular, what can a physician do to prevent the manifold injuries
which, if not properly controlled, it will bring to his patients? These
are practical questions directly to our purpose.
The first requisite for all effective action is to have correct
knowledge and strong convictions on a subject. No one will check a
passion with firmness if he have a lingering doubt as to whether, after
all, he is strictly bound to restrain it. As a man's mind matures, at
least if his mind be upright and not distorted by the strain of a ruling
passion, he understands more and more thoroughly that his perfection
consists and his highest interests lie in obeying at all times the law
of reason, in maintaining his specific dignity of a rational being, and
not allowing himself to be controlled by passion, the ruling power of
brute animals. Besides, he becomes aware in various ways of the evil
results of immoral practices, and he sees many reasons to keep his
passions in check. But young people have neither such experience nor
such information, and they are not always wise enough to understand the
imperative dictates of self-restraint. And yet it is often in early
years, while body and mind are in the period of development, that the
most serious injury is done to the constitution and to the character by
the indulgence of carnal pleasures. Habits are then engendered which
become a real slavery; so that later in life when there arises a sincere
desire to stop such disgraceful practices, there is a feeling of
impotence to resist temptations which by one's own fault have become a
second nature.
What then can be done with the young? They must early and
authoritatively be told of the wrong, the sin of base self-indulgence,
and of every practice that leads to it. If a beginning of immorality is
discovered in a child, it must be plainly told and emphatically warned
of the serious consequences involved. The child's mother is, as a rule,
the best guide and director in infancy. Later on, the Doctor has
frequent chances to do so; it comes from him with better grace than from
others; and his warning is likely to be minded, because it is clear that
he knows and ought to know what he is talking about with regard to
bodily consequences. Yet it is always a matter of delicacy; and great
care should be taken lest, while pointing out the evil, there be also a
stimulus added to a prurient curiosity.
Much good sense is required in any given case to decide whether more
good or more evil is likely to result from the warning; in doubt of
success, it is better to leave the matter alone.
"Where ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise."
The safest way of repressing the passion of lust is the provision that
an all-wise Providence supplies in Religion, in which God
authoritatively forbids all immoral action and even all immoral coveting
or desire. Positive dogmatic teaching on this subject is required,
especially with the young. You cannot argue with them on this matter as
you can with grown people. That is one reason why religious teaching
should permeate early education. The Decalogue should be the back-bone
of a child's training: and it should be proposed on the authority of
God, and explained so as to check not only sinful acts, but also
covetings, prurient curiosity, improper reading, immodest looks and
thoughts, in a word, whatever paves the way to the walks of sin. The
greatest of teachers has Himself laid down the law in this matter: it
must be proposed as coming from His divine lips, as it did: "I say to
you that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her has already
committed adultery with her in his heart" (St. Matt. v. 28). The lesson
is enforced by these words of the great Apostle: "Neither fornicators,
nor adulterers, nor the effeminate ... shall possess the kingdom of God"
(1 Cor. vi. 9, 10).
True, the child will not realize the full import of such lessons; but he
will understand it in due time; and already in early years he will be
warned against indulging his nascent passions. It is well that the
conscience should be early awakened in this matter; for the more this
passion is indulged, the more it craves for further indulgence till it
becomes almost uncontrollable.
III. No possible evil to any individual man or woman can result from the
firm control that one may acquire over the passion of lust. On the
contrary, if it should be controlled all through life, this would only
add to a man's strength of mind, firmness of will, soundness of body,
and length of life. For in the school of morality, in which every
Physician should be educated, the leading principle is: "Contraries are
cured by contraries," "_Contraria contrariis curantur_." On this
principle, lust is most efficiently controlled by aiming, at least in
youth, at total abstinence from its indulgence. You know that, in the
Catholic Church, priests and religious lead a single life, and pledge
themselves for life to practise the most perfect control of the sexual
passion. What do you think is the result of their total abstinence on
this point with regard to their length of days? As a rule their life is
much longer, in normal circumstances, than that of the other learned
professions. Here are a few proofs. In France, during the twenty years
from 1823 to 1843, 750 priests died in the diocese of Paris. Of these
only 200 were under sixty years old; there were 554 between sixty and
seventy years old, 448 over seventy, and 177 over eighty. Again, of 202
Carmelite nuns who died in a large convent of Paris, Dr. Descuret, the
attending physician, states that 82 had lived over seventy years, 23
over eighty years. Most Trappists and Carthusians die of scarcely any
other sickness than old age. All young people who aspire to the clerical
or religious profession learn from their early years the holiness and
the loveliness of purity. Our Church effects this result by placing
before their youthful imaginations the most perfect of patterns of
virtue, the infant Saviour, the virgin Mother, the boy saints Aloysius
and Stanislaus, the maidens Agatha and Cecilia, and a whole phalanx of
Christian heroes and heroines.
I dwell the more willingly on this subject, gentlemen, because, besides
protecting modesty in your young patients generally, it may fall to the
lot of some of you, in the course of your professional careers, to be
attending physicians to religious houses; and you will then appreciate
the delicacy of the flowers of virtue that bloom beneath the shadow of
the sanctuary. Certainly even there you may happen to find isolated
cases of infidelity to duty; for human nature is not angelic nature; but
in such abodes it comes near to it, at least for the vast majority.
IV. On the other hand, what sad havoc does not the sexual passion play
where it is precociously developed and wantonly indulged. Dr. H.
Fournier, one of the most eminent physicians of Paris, says: "There is
not a vice more fatal to the conservation of man than masturbation."
This unfortunate habit is sometimes acquired by very little boys and
girls. Foolish or vicious nurses may bring it on by handling young
children most indelicately. This is one of the many reasons why none but
virtuous servants and nurses should be employed by wise parents and
physicians. In later years, children often learn this degrading and most
injurious vice from their depraved companions, some of whom seem even to
regard the practice of it as a manly accomplishment. When habitually
indulged in, it produces on the health and the strength of the
constitution effects the most deplorable. Even the intellect is liable
to become thereby enfeebled, a want of virility is exhibited both in the
body and in the mind of its victims; then follows a loss of ambition and
self-control. "When this morbid passion gets control of a person,"
writes an experienced practitioner in medicine, "it is as though an
unclean spirit had entered, subdued the will, weakened the moral forces,
enfeebled the intellectual faculties, lessened the power to resist
temptation, and overcome every obstacle opposed to its gratification.
Even while the intellect is still clear, and the sense of wrong keen,
the individual is a slave to this morbid impulse." Though the baneful
effects may not always affect the physical health of the victim, the
unfortunate practice very often engenders in boys and girls tendencies
which in later years lead to all the miseries conspicuous in houses of
debauch and infamy. But I need not dwell on consequences that belong to
pathology rather than to Jurisprudence.
V. Confining myself to my sphere of what is morally right or wrong, I
must be permitted to point out some gross violations of duty in some
members of your honored profession. There are physicians so reckless of
consequences and of principles alike as to advise at times the practice
of illicit sexual intercourse. Let them beware; they are doing a very
unwise and guilty act. Even if an immoral practice should save a human
life, it may not be indulged, on the principle which must be by this
time very familiar to your ears, that the end does not justify the
means. And besides no good result can be expected from what is contrary
to the law of nature and of nature's God. It was to punish sins of the
flesh that the Deluge was sent, which destroyed nearly the whole human
race. "All flesh had corrupted its way," says the sacred historian. It
was to punish unlawful indulgence of lust that Sodom and Gomorrha were
destroyed by fire from heaven; and the memory of these guilty cities is
preserved in the very name of Sodomy. Onan, as the same sacred volume
relates (Gen. xxxviii), performed the marriage act in a manner to
frustrate it of its legitimate purpose, the generation of children, and
the Lord slew him; and his sin is to this very day branded with his name
and called Onanism. And yet in Christian lands physicians are found who
will at times dare to recommend such practices to their patients.
On the occasions mentioned, God punished the guilty miraculously; but
that is not His usual way. He has so contrived our natures that sins
committed against His laws in our bodies ordinarily bring a part of
their punishment in their train, not the less certain because slower in
its operation than a miracle would be. All the venereal diseases are
there to act as earthy ministers of Heaven's justice, anticipating, and
often mercifully averting, the punishments of the future world.
VI. Besides private and secret tortures of body and mind, a public and
most deplorable calamity has descended of late on our own vigorous young
nation, as well as on some older lands, threatening in the not distant
future the extinction of many of its most esteemed families and of what
was, not long ago, a vigorous stock. The following article by Dr. Walter
Lindley, Professor of Gynecology in the University of Southern
California, will explain the matter better than my words could do. It
was read in Los Angeles at a meeting of the Southern Californian Medical
Society in June, 1895, and is printed in the "N. Y. Medical Journal" of
August 17 of the same year (pp. 211 and following). It is headed
"American Sterility;" I will quote freely from it:
"The obstetrician finds his vocation disappearing among the American
women from the face of the earth.
"It is a fact that the American family with more than one or two
children is the exception. From the records of six generations of
families in some New England towns, it was found that the families
comprising the first generation had on an average between eight and ten
children; the next three generations averaged about seven to each
family; the fifth generation less than three to each family. The
generation now on the stage is not doing so well as that. In
Massachusetts the average family numbers less than three persons. In
1885 the census of Massachusetts disclosed that 71.28 per cent of the
women of that State were childless. The census of 1885 in the State of
New York shows that twenty-five per cent of the women of that State are
childless, fifty per cent average less than one child, and seventy-five
per cent average only a trifle over one child.
"Southern California has fully as dark a record as New England--that is,
in the family where the man and wife are American-born. It goes without
saying that the medical profession in this country is composed to a
great extent of typical progressive Americans, and I ask you to make
mental statistics of the children in the families of the physicians in
Southern California, and you will find very few of them containing more
than two.
"Had the Rev. T. R. Malthus lived in the United States to-day, he would
never have argued about the danger of over-population, as he did in his
interesting volume on 'The Principles of Population.'"
After quoting the views of Plato, Aristotle, and Lycurgus, Dr. Lindley
continues: "In Southern California there are, it is true, many children,
but the average American family is very small.
"As I sat writing this an evening or two ago, I jotted down the names of
twenty-five families of my acquaintance in Los Angeles, taking them as
fast as I thought of them. The list was composed entirely of
professional and business men ranging in age from thirty-five to fifty.
All had been married quite a number of years. The result of my
memorandum was that in these twenty-five families there were but
eighteen children. These families were wholly unselected, and are about
the average Protestant American families outside the rank of laborers.
"What are the causes of this small proportion of children? Disease,
preventives of conception, and abortion form the trinity of
responsibility in this grave condition. It is true that the first cause
(disease) results in many women being barren, but I believe that you
will agree with me that the last two causes, preventives of conception
and abortion, are the two chief causes.
"The A. P. A. might find food for thought by investigating the
infrequency of criminal abortion in Catholic families in the United
States. It is the Protestant or agnostic American who too often uses one
of the preventives of conception." (Here the Doctor refers to a
foot-note in which he says: "I write this opinion as a Protestant, and
should be glad to learn that it is not well founded.") He continues:
"If, through inadvertence, pregnancy should occur, then an abortion is
in order. Disease and poverty and war and accident all work together to
keep down the population, but we are overcoming these. Plagues and
pestilences are rare. The number who die of starvation in California is
very small, while war has played but a small part. Through the diffusion
of the laws of sanitation, improved dietary, and advanced therapeutics,
the longevity of man is increasing, but the American woman's aversion to
child-bearing is blighting our civilization, and can be well named the
twentieth-century curse. In this aversion the woman frequently echoes
the wish of the husband.
"A large proportion of the American young women who marry do so with the
determination that they will have no children. They are abetted in this
notion by many elderly women. The cure for this terrible sentiment is
education. The home, the press, the schoolroom, and the pulpit should
be centres for reviving the ancient idea of the nobility of motherhood.
The physician should not underestimate his influence.
"By constantly bearing in mind the danger of the present tendencies, he
can do much to change the current. Let us hope that we shall again see
the day when thoughtful motherhood shall be considered the highest
function of womanhood, and to shirk this natural duty will be deemed a
disgrace."
Gentlemen, it would be easy to prove that this testimony of Dr. Lindley
is not that of an exceptional witness, or a piece of special pleading;
but it is the acknowledged conviction of the medical profession
generally, confirmed by the last United States Census, and in fact not
questioned, to my knowledge, by any weighty authority. As early as 1857,
Dr. H. B. Storer, an eminent physician of Boston, startled the community
by publishing two books on this subject, entitled: "Criminal Abortion.
Why not?--A Book for Every Woman"; "Is it I?--A Book for Every Man."
Soon after, Rev. John Todd, a Protestant minister of Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, published a work styled "Serpents in the Dove's Nest,"
all which works and a multitude of others tell the same tale of woe
regarding the increase of child-destroying crimes in New England,
chiefly among the old stock peculiarly called Americans. Dr. Nathan
Allen, of Lowell, Massachusetts, in his treatises, "Changes in the New
England Population" and "The New England Family," gives overwhelming
testimony. "Harper's Magazine" (quoted by the "Catholic World" for
April, 1869) remarks: "We are shocked at the destruction of human life
on the banks of the Ganges, but here in the heart of Christendom
fœticide and infanticide are extensively practised under the most
aggravating circumstances." We Catholics are not personally interested
in this matter; but the good of our fellow-men and chiefly our
fellow-countrymen calls for the earnest exertion of us all to stop this
dreadful evil. All the works I have referred to exempt Catholics from
the blame pronounced; the "Harper's Magazine" article referred to
expressly says: "It should be stated that believers in the Roman
Catholic faith never resort to any such practices; the strictly
Americans are almost alone guilty of such crimes." This matter is fully
explained in a recent work called "Catholic and Protestant Countries
Compared," by Rev. Alfred Young, C.P., ch. xxxii.
VII. Now, gentlemen, I am very much afraid that while physicians as a
body abhor all such murders and openly condemn them, many do not show
much repugnance to allow, and even sometimes to suggest, such onanistic
intercourse among married people as shall prevent the possibility of
conception. For instance, if it happens that a young mother suffers much
in her first confinement, at once the suggestion is made that a second
parturition may prove fatal. From that moment regular intercourse is
dreaded. Either onanism is habitually practised, or the husband becomes
a frequent visitor to dens of infamy, where to where to save his wife's
health, he encourages a traffic that leads multitudes of wretched girls
to a premature and miserable death. Every one despises those outcasts of
society; but are not the men who patronize them just as guilty? Probably
enough, if the imprudent suggestion about dangers of a second
child-bearing had not been made by the Doctor, the young wife might have
become the happy mother of a numerous family of healthy children. For we
must trust in Divine Providence. If a husband and wife do their
conscientious duty, there is a God that provides for them and their
family more liberally than for the birds of the air and the lilies of
the field. And if He should so dispose that the worst should befall,
well, such temporal clangers and sufferings as attend child-bearing are
the lot of woman-kind, just as the dangers and hardships of the
battlefield, the mine, the factory, the forest, and the prairie are the
lot of the men.
The man who shirks his duty to family or country is a coward; women, as
a rule, are brave enough in their own line of duty, and patiently submit
to God's sentence pronounced in Paradise, "I will multiply thy sorrows
and thy conceptions, in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children" (Gen.
iii. 16), just as they have to submit to the words immediately
following: "Thou shalt be under thy husband's power, and he shall have
dominion over thee."
Certainly, the husband of a delicate woman ought to spare her strength
and restrain his passion, but not at the sacrifice of morality; and
Doctors ought to be very careful not to cause false or exaggerated
alarms, and thus make themselves to some extent responsible for untold
moral evils. They should remember that, as a rule, the raising of a
family is the principal purpose of a married life. The happiness and
virtue of the parties concerned depend chiefly on the faithful
performance of this duty. How sad is the lot of those--and they are
many--who undertook in early years of married life to prescribe a narrow
limit to the number of their children; they had one or two, and they
would have no more, and for this purpose criminally thwarted the
purposes of nature. Then comes death and snatches away their solitary
consolation: and they spend their old age childless and loveless, in
mutual upbraidings and unavailing regrets.
How different is the lot of those aged couples--and they were many of
yore, and are yet in various nations--who are like patriarchs amid their
crowds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, dwelling
in mutual love and as if in a moral paradise where all domestic virtues
bloom!
VIII. True, such families are usually the outcome of moderately early
marriages; and many Doctors nowadays disapprove of such unions as an
evil. A moral evil they certainly are not; and the physical evils
sometimes attending them must, I think, be traceable to a variety of
causes; for such evils are certainly not inseparable from early
marriages. As to their moral advantages, Mr. Wm. E. H. Lecky, in his
"History of European Morals," writes of the Irish people in particular:
"The nearly universal custom of early marriages among the Irish
peasantry has alone rendered possible that high standard of female
chastity, that intense and jealous sensitiveness respecting female
honor, for which, among many failings and some vices, the Irish race
have long been pre-eminent in Europe" (v. i. p. 146). And that he does
not confine his statement to female chastity is evident from what he
adds farther on: "There is no fact in Irish history more singular than
the complete and, I believe, unparalleled absence among the Irish
priesthood of those moral scandals which in every Continental country
occasionally prove the danger of vows of celibacy. The unsuspected
purity of the Irish priesthood in this respect is the more remarkable,
because, the government of the country being Protestant, there is no
special inquisitorial legislation to insure it, because of the almost
unbounded influence of the clergy over their parishioners, and also
because, if any just cause of suspicion existed, in the fierce
sectarianism of Irish public opinion it would assuredly be magnified.
Considerations of climate are quite inadequate to explain this fact; but
the chief cause is, I think, sufficiently obvious. The habit of marrying
at the first development of the passions has produced among the Irish
peasantry, from whom the priests for the most part spring, an extremely
strong feeling of the iniquity of irregular sexual indulgence, which
retains its power even over those who are bound to perpetual celibacy"
(p. 147). No one will say, I believe, that the custom of early marriages
in Ireland has any injurious effects on the health of either parents or
children. Nor need it necessarily have such effects on those of our
American young men and women who lead regular lives and are not
enfeebled by unnatural vices or demoralized by dainty food and luxurious
manners.
A wise physician has many proper ways of providing for the health and
strength of both parents and children without advocating practices which
are a snare for innocence. Let him insist with all his patients on the
cultivation of healthful habits for the family and the individual;
wholesome and not over-delicate food; moderation in eating and drinking;
regular and manly exercise, especially in the open air; early hours for
retiring and rising. But, above all--and this is directly to our present
purpose--let him show the greatest regard for the laws of morality, the
main support of individual and social happiness. His views upon such
matters, manifested alike in his conduct and his conversation, but
especially in his management of cases involving the application of moral
principles, will go far to influence the community in which he moves.
His task is to be a blessing to his fellow-men, a source of happiness
and security to individuals and to society.