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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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.