At the first symptom of Sexual Decay or Nervous Exhaustion, the person
thus affected should have his urine carefully and thoroughly analyzed by
some competent person. In saying "competent person," we speak advisedly,
for but few chemists and fewer physicians are competent to make such
an examination and draw correct deductions from what is to be found
there. Any person can, with the proper reagents, test his urine for
the presence or absence of semen, but he cannot make the thorough,
scientific, chemical and microscopical analysis that is sometimes needed
in order to arrive at a full and perfect diagnosis and successful
treatment.
{Illustration: Fig. 3.
URINE OF A YOUNG MAN SUFFERING WITH SPERMATORRHOEA.
1. Epithelial Scales from the Prostate Gland.
2. Scales from the Kidney Tubes.
3, 4. Scales from the Kidney Tubes swollen and degenerated.
5. Spermatazoa, wasted, shriveled, imperfect and dead. (In this case
the Varicocele had extended up the cord.)}
If losses of semen are taking place in the urine, it would be well to
forward a sample of it at once, for a full and extended analysis, which
will be made for the nominal fee of $2, merely to cover the cost of
chemicals.
Our Chemical Laboratory is under the supervision of Mr. G. H. E. Du
Bell, Ph.D., a thoroughly competent quantitative and qualitative
analytical chemist, a graduate of the French and German Universities
and also a licentiate in this country, who, with his able corps of
assistants, makes all examinations and reports in full upon them to the
Medical Chief of Staff, who in turn submits them with the histories of
each to the full Consulting Board or Staff.
_CHAPTER III._
THE FORMS, SYMPTOMS AND CONSEQUENCES
Of Masturbation, Spermatorrhoea, Nervous Exhaustion
and Spinal Irritability.
In no disease known to us are the symptoms precisely the same in every
case. They vary with the constitutional peculiarities of the individual.
Yet in nearly every case there are certain prominent or leading symptoms
(signs) that are rarely absent at _some_ stage of the disease. We give
here the more noticeable ones at first laid down by +Lallemand+, the
great French physician, who first gave us the name "Spermatorrhoea,"
who first wrote upon this disease, who was the first to discover the
connection between the losses of semen and certain symptoms here given,
and who, too, was the great originator of that treatment so successfully
perfected by his successor, +Prof. Civiale+, and which is now the
_standard_ treatment, recognized and adopted in all the French
hospitals.