_Descriptions taken from the book intitled ONANIA._
Since the publication of this work, I have learnt, from a very
respectable quarter, that an entire faith ought not to be given to
the English collection, and that this reason, together with certain
calumnies, some obscenities, and the forgery of an imperial privilege,
had made the German translation be prohibited in the Empire. These
motives would have determined me to suppress all that I had extracted
from that work, but some considerations have induced me to preserve it,
under the modification of this præ-advertisement. The first is, that some
of these reasons concern only the German edition. Another is, that though
there may be some facts invented, as indeed some of them plainly enough
appear to carry with them a stamp of falsity, it is yet proved, that the
greatest number of them are but too true. In short, a third consideration
which determined me, is what I find in the above-mentioned letter of
M. STEHELIN. “I have (says he) received a letter from M. Hoffman of
Maestrich, in which he acquaints me of his having seen a practiser of
self-pollution, who had already drawn on himself a _tabes dorsalis_,
which he had, without success, attempted to cure, and the patient was
afterwards cured by the remedies of the _Onania_, of which Dr. BECKERS
of London is supposeably the author, and so well cured, that he has
recovered his corpulence, is strong and healthy, and has four children.”
The English book of _Onania_ is a perfect chaos, and the most indigested
work that has been produced a long time. It is only the observations that
can bear reading. All the reflections of the author, whom I could not
believe a physician, are nothing but theological or moral trivialisms.
I shall not extract from all this work, which is rather of the longest,
any thing but a description of the most common accidents, of which the
patients complain. The vivacity, the pathetic expressions of pain and
repentance, which are found in a few of the letters in that book, I omit
in this extract; but the want of them ought not to weaken the impression
of horror which the reading of the facts themselves should inspire, as it
is on the facts that the impression depends; and the readers will rather
have to thank me for sparing him the perusal of a much greater number of
others, without order or diction. I shall class under six heads those
evils of which the English patients complain, and begin with the most
grievous, those of the soul.
_First._ All the intellectual faculties are weakened; the memory fails;
the ideas are confused or clouded; the patients sometimes even fall into
a slight degree of insanity; they are continually under a kind of inward
restlessness, and feel a constant anguish, with such pangs of confidence
and remorse, as make them shed tears in bitterness of heart. They are
subject to giddiness; all the senses, and especially those of seeing
and hearing, grow weaker and weaker; their sleep, if sleep they can, is
disturbed by disagreeable or frightful dreams.
2. The bodily strength entirely fails; the growth of those who have not
done growing, and who abandon themselves to this detestable practice,
is considerably checked. Some can get no sleep at all, others are in a
state of continual dozing. All of them almost become hypochondriacs,
or hysteric, and are overwhelmed with all the evils that attend those
dreadful disorders; melancholy, sighs, tears, palpitations; suffocations,
fainting fits. Some have been known to spit calcarious matter. Coughs, a
slow fever, consumptions, are the punishments which some find in their
own crimes.
3. The most acute pains are another subject of complaint in the patients.
One complains of his head, another of his breast, the stomach, the
intestines, aches of external rheumatisms; some are affected with an
obtuse sensation of pain in all the parts of the body, on the slightest
impression.
4. There are not only to be seen pimples on the face, which is one of the
commonest symptoms, but even blotches, or suppurative pustules, on the
face, nose, breast, thighs, with cruel itchings on those parts. Nay, one
patient complained of fleshy excrescences on his forehead.
5. The organs of generation come in also for their share of the
sufferings, of which they are themselves the primary cause. Many patients
become incapable of erection; in others, the seminal humor comes away in
the moment of the slightest stimulation, and of the weakest erection;
some will even evacuate it on going to stool. Numbers are attacked with
an habitual gonorrhœa, which intirely destroys constitutional vigor, and
the matter of it resembles a fetid _sanies_, or foul mucosity. Others are
tormented with painful priapisms. Dysuries, stranguries, heat of urine,
a weakening of its spirt, put the patients to cruel inconveniences and
pains. Some have very painful tumors in the testicles, in the penis, the
bladder, the spermatic string. In short, either the impossibility of
coition, or the depravation of the seminal humor, renders incapable of
procreation almost all those who have long abandoned themselves to this
crime.
6. The functions of the intestines are sometimes totally disordered, and
some patients complain of an obstinate costiveness, others of the piles,
or of the running of a fetid matter from the fundament.
This last observation reminds me of a young man, who, after every act of
self-pollution, was attacked with a diarrhœa, which must be an additional
cause of a diminution of strength to him.