"Lost Manhood Restored" is probably the greatest of all medical
grafts. These men succeed simply because of the total ignorance of the
people on matters pertaining to the sexual system.
If sexual physiology was a part of the studies in the public schools
for pupils at the age of fourteen there would be no cases of nervous
debility, and the "lost manhood" physician would have to seek other
fields for the display of his talents.
One of the saddest of all the habits that young men drop into at some
period of their lives is the secret vice. Until quite lately prudery
has prevented its proper discussion and about the only literature on
the subject was to be found in that issued by advertising doctors who
treat the effects.
One thing is certain--no one ever acquired the habit by reading one
of these "scare" or quack books. John Stuart Mill, in speaking of
this vice, says: "The diseases of society can be no more checked or
healed without publicly speaking of them than can those of the body."
To ignore or deny the prevalence of the evil is sometimes honest
ignorance, but is more often hypocrisy.
A little scientific discussion on this subject is not out of place
here. It will put young men on their guard against themselves, and cut
off in some degree the income of that class of doctors who live on
their credulity.
So far as I have been able to trace its origin it has always been
with us. According to Ovid, Horace and Aristophanes, it was a curse
in ancient Greece and Rome. Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine
380 years before Christ, considered it a subject worthy of his pen. Of
modern writers the greatest was Tissot, in 1760, who issued a classic
on this subject whose object was to stay, if possible, the abuses and
vices which threatened the ruin of the French people. Lurid as the
little book distributed by specialists usually is, the effects of this
vice depicted by Tissot puts them all into the shade. If not exactly
scientific, it at least exerted a large moral influence which was
beneficial in the then state of public and private morals.
In the discussion of secret sin let us make it plain that the evil
effects are not immediate, as is often thought and frequently
taught by school teachers and writers. The brain is not palsied at
once. Dementia, palsy and sudden death are not likely to occur. The
erroneous idea that it does, accounts in a great measure for the
terror, the bashfulness and the love of solitude exhibited by this
class of sufferers.
It is enough for the purpose of this article that in the course of
physical decay, gray hair, baldness and enfeebled gait, weakness
of the muscular and nervous system, in fact, a general lowering of
the tone of the bodily health, appear. Life has been lived out with
abandon, its energies have been overdrawn and its wheels have run down
like the mainspring of a clock whose regulator has been lost.
The sporty and fast life led by reckless youth is making him pay the
penalty. And what is the penalty? Look at the daily papers, see the
brazen medical advertisements, "Manhood Restored" staring at you from
every page. These advertisements are costly. They run up into the
thousands of dollars a month. One man, a doctor of Chicago, formerly
paid the daily press eight thousand dollars a month for advertising;
his "Lost Manhood, Varicocele and Hydrocele Cured" appeared in almost
every paper in this city.
And the people who needed the treatment paid the bills. So powerful
was this man's influence that he was enabled to stave off undesirable
legislation at Springfield. In this he was aided by the newspapers,
who did not wish to lose this princely revenue from quack doctors.
This doctor is still in business, but on a small scale compared to
former times. Competition and the advent of more mendacious liars have
reduced his income to more modest proportions than it once was.