Читать книгу A Treatise on the Crime of Onan. Illustrated with a Variety of Cases, Together with the Method of Cure онлайн

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Fresh observations, subsequently introduced, will confirm the truth of the preceding dreadful description. That one furnished by M. Storcke, in the valuable work which he has published on the history and cure of diseases, is not less terrible: but I refer the curious to the work itself, which no physician would wish to be without. The passage I allude to is in his Medicus annuus, T. ii. p. 215, &c. But before I terminate this Section, I shall here conclusively add a passage in that excellent work, with which M. Gaubius has lately enriched the medical art. He not only paints the evils, but points out the causes of them, with that force, that truth, that sagacity, that exactness, which can belong to none but so great a master. It is a most valuable extract; and that the coloring of it may appear in its true lustre, I subjoin to the translation the original of it, in the language of the author’s expression.

“An immoderate profusion of seed is pernicious, not only through the waste of that most useful humor, but also through the over-frequent repetition of that convulsive motion which is produced by the emission. For the highest pitch of that pleasure is immediately succeeded by so universal a relaxation of the animal strength, as cannot be borne often without a consequential enervity. The more frequent a draught there is on the secretory ducts of the body, the greater is the derivation of the respective humors of the secretions; so that in the case of the liquid being repeatedly attracted to the parts of generation, the rest of the secretions are depauperated: thence, from excesses of venery follow, weariness, weakness, immobility, a tottering gait, pains of the head, convulsions, a hebetation of all the senses, and especially of the sight, blindness, intellectual imbecillity, a feverish circulation, dryness, leanness, a phthisis, a tabes dorsalis, an effeminate habit of body. These evils are liable to augment and become incurable through that perpetual pruriency for venery which the mind does not less than the body at length contract; and from which it follows, that obscene imaginations haunt even the dreams of persons so affected, and that the parts prone to the libidinous turgescence are, on every occasion, impetuously sollicited, while the quantity of the repaired seminal fluid, were it never so small, occasions constantly a troublesome stimulation, and is ready to start from its relaxed repositories with any the least endeavour, or even without any endeavor at all. Whence it is clear why an excess of this nature is so capable of blasting the flower of youth[33].”