Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

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From the foregoing we shall understand why so many people, whether male or female—possibly the latter in greater number—who live in total sexual abstinence, present symptoms of neurasthenia or hysteria; for it has been shown by Rigaud and also by Mingazzini, that animals, living in total sexual abstinence, present alterations in the epithelia of the sexual glands (see ssss1).

It would be simply hypocrisy and unworthy of a scientific work which should always aspire to reveal the truth, were we to deny the fact that many old bachelors and spinsters present a series of nervous symptoms, especially dyspepsia and hyperchlorhydria and pains in the stomach, far more than other persons, which we must explain by the action of impulses coming from the sexual organs to the sympathetic and pneumogastric, the principal nerves of the stomach and intestines, and thus producing a hyperæsthesia of the nerves of the stomach. In such persons some kinds of food, well digested by a normal stomach, will act as an injurious foreign body, and be felt as such by the over-sensitive stomach nerves, and the gastric glands will respond with a large flow of secretion and much acid upon agencies that produce no such stimulation in a normal stomach.