How senseless, then, to endeavor to cure such conditions with stomach
medicines. Still, the CIVIALE method does not wholly discard them.
They have their place and their purpose, and served it well. It was
his practice in many cases to use +Nervines+ and +Tonics+, as well
as +Digestives+ and +Laxatives+, by the stomach, and with excellent
results, for in many of these cases the +digestion was poor+, the +liver
torpid+, the +bowels sluggish+ and +constipated+, and +filled with
wind+, the +appetite capricious+ and +uneven+. +Crayons+ in the urethra
could not wholly cure these symptoms, although they stopped the drain
that originally caused them. Combined with the +Tonic-Regulator+, the
results were prompt and satisfactory.
+Many patients began to recuperate the moment the inflammation,
stricture, ulceration and accompanying losses of vital fluid were
stopped, and were soon in robust health again+. In others, however,
he found it best, +at the same time that he was healing the diseased+
urethra, to +clear and invigorate the debilitated nerves and weary
minds, to tone up the stomach and bowels, set the liver gently working,
start the kidneys+ (nearly always congested), +and infuse new life,
strength and vigorous impulses into the whole system by means of his
Tonic-Regulator+, which is a pleasant and most efficacious combination
of +tonics+, +laxatives+ (not purgatives), and +deobstruents+. +Skin,
kidneys, lungs, heart, mind, nerves, stomach, liver and bowels, were
all set to working right+. And, as a consequence, aided by the urethral
remedies, the +losses ceased+, erectile power and +sexual vigor
returned, the step became buoyant and elastic, the mind clear, the
memory retentive, the eyes clear and bright, the lips and cheeks ruddy
with healthful color; the whole system, indeed, renovated, refreshed and
re-invigorated.+
_CHAPTER VII._
THE DUTIES, RESPONSIBILITIES AND FAILURES
IN AND OF MARRIED LIFE.
What more perfect or pleasing picture than that of happy married life.
Yet how little of it we see! How the newspapers dish up to us in strong
words the misery, despair, wretchedness, infidelity and deceit of the
divorce court. How it stares at us from the desolate fireside of friend
and acquaintance; is hinted at or suppressed by the records of the
Coroner's office; leers at us from the sumptuous mansion of the
affluent; lurks in the humble cottage of the mechanic. How sad the
contrast between the home where nestle happiness, love, contentment,
offspring; and the abode of suspicion, deceit, infidelity or barrenness.
And yet men and women are being married every day, every hour--ay, every
minute. Men and women incompatible physically, mentally, morally--urged
on by lust, cupidity, love; to escape unhappy homes; to hide sad
sins--for a thousand reasons, some good, many bad--are constantly
marrying.
A man selects a wife less carefully than he would a horse; a woman
yields herself, her life, her happiness, blindly, unreasoningly, to a
man of whom she knows nothing. A man better fitted for the hospital, the
infirmary, or the insane asylum, enters the bonds of wedlock with never
a thought of the consequences; with never a care as to whether he will
wreck his own life and happiness or that of the innocent girl he is
deceiving; with never a heed of the ill-starred, diseased, puny or
idiotic progeny his act may bring into being, a burden to the community,
a curse to himself and a constant reminder of the parent's
foolhardiness--ay, even crime!
No man who is affected with any form of Sexual or Venereal Disease
should for a single instant even think of +marriage+ until every +trace+
of his +weakness+ or +disease+ has disappeared. In these days of medical
advance in this special field, there is no excuse for such action. There
are few--very few--cases of Seminal Weakness and Impotency that cannot
now be cured. Of course, here as elsewhere, there are traps and humbugs,
quacks and charlatans, false theories and empty moralizing; but there
is also truth and knowledge, hope and certainty for such as are
sufficiently in earnest to search for them. Prof. Civiale, by his
indomitable perseverance, thorough study and experiment, and final
conclusions and discoveries, has placed the means of a perfect
restoration to full mental, bodily and sexual vigor within the reach of
all, and no man has any right now to enter either blindly or wilfully
into so sacred and important a relationship as marriage, and to lower
and stultify its ends by blighting the happiness of a fair young wife,
exhausting his own vitality in the vain attempt to have offspring, or in
having such as shall be a curse to him through life.
There are those (let it be hoped they are really honest in their
ignorance) who look upon marriage as the only real cure for Seminal
Weaknesses. Even if it were a fact that the marital relations did
accomplish such a result (and they never do, as bear witness the
thousands who are to-day weak, exhausted, ex-sanguinated, unhappy,
nerveless, hopeless wrecks, who are cursing the ignorant pretenders
who gave this false--this fatal advice); even if such a result was a
certainty, what right has any man to besmirch and soil the purity of a
happy and innocent maiden for such a purpose? By what law of humanity
are woman's hopes and happiness to be hazarded on so fragile a basis,
her bark of life to be launched into a pool of such sickening
bestiality? Such marriages bear and are bearing deadly fruit before our
eyes day by day, in infidelity, abandonment, suicide, insanity, crime
and prostitution--in disease and misery, even to the third and fourth
generation.
A SPECIAL SET OF PRE-MARITAL (Before Marriage) REMEDIES.
No more delicate or wonderful piece of mechanism, no more grandly
conceived and wonderfully perfected bit of God's handicraft is to be
found than the Male and Female Sexual Organs. It is a wonder to those
who have made these parts (with their elastic vessels, cavernous
sinuses, network of nervous ganglia and fibrillæ, chain of lymphatics,
periodical ovulation, timed pubescence, and perfected, co-ordinate
functions) a study, that they stand abuse and excess so well; that
the fierce blasts of lust and passion that sear and scorch them and
well-nigh dry up their fountain springs of vitality and fecundity, do
not wholly destroy or hopelessly disarrange their delicate tissues and
functions.
The first few years of married life, even to a healthy man, are fraught
with dangers he knows nothing of. How much more then is the sufferer
from a present or even a former Seminal Weakness in danger.
No man, be he ever so healthy, ever so conscious of purity and freedom
from abuse, should enter the marital state without preparing for the
strain naturally to be expected. As the voice, skin, hair, manner and
morals of the youth change at the period of puberty (when the sexual
power is first developed--when he first becomes a man), so does the
system, mental and moral, change when he enters the bonds of matrimony.
If at puberty new diseases are prone to show themselves and old ones to
be outgrown, so at marriage a like change must be at least expected, and
he who blindly or thoughtlessly hazards a leap in the dark is foolish,
or rather foolhardy.