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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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.

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The object of description occurring in my first observation is dreadful; I was myself frighted at the first time of my seeing the unfortunate sufferer, who is the subject of it. Then it was that I felt, more than I had ever before done, the necessity of pointing put to young people, all the horrors of that precipice down which they voluntarily cast themselves.

L. D——, a watchmaker, had been clear of vice, and enjoyed a good state of health, till the age of seventeen, when he gave himself up to self-pollution, which he repeated every day, and often thrice a day, when the ejaculation was always preceded and accompanied by a slight fainting fit, or privation of the senses, and a convulsive motion of the exterior muscles of the head, which drew it strongly backward, while his neck swelled prodigiously. There had not passed a whole year, before he began to feel a great weakness after each act: this warning was not sufficient to draw him out of the mire. His soul, wholly ingrossed by the filth of this obscenity, was no longer capable of any other ideas, and the reiterations of his crime became every day more frequent, till he found himself in a condition, that gave him apprehensions of death. Sensible of his danger too late, the mischief had made too great a progress to admit of a cure. The parts of generation were become so irritable, and so weak, that there did not need any fresh act on the part of that wretched object, to make them let go the seed. The slightest irritation procured, instantly, an imperfect erection, which was immediately followed by an evacuation of that liquid, and this daily augmented his weakness. That convulsion, which before he was not used to experience but just at the time of the consummation of the act, and which ceased at the same time, was become habitual, and often attacked him without any apparent cause, with such violence too, that during the time of the fit, which sometimes lasted fifteen hours, and never less than eight, he suffered, in the nape of his neck, such violent pains, that commonly his outcries sounded like piteous howlings, and it was impossible for him, while the fit lasted, to swallow any thing whatever, liquid or solid. He had contracted a hoarseness of voice, but I did not observe it more so out of the fit than in it. He totally lost his strength. Incapable of every thing, overwhelmed with misery, he languished, almost without any assistence, for some months; being the more to be pitied, for that some remains of memory, which however it was not long till that was abolished, only served constantly to recall to him the causes of his wretchedness, and to augment to him the horrors of remorse. I was told his condition. I went to him, and found him less a living creature than a cadaverous figure, lying upon straw, meagre, pale, sallow, sending forth an infectious smell, and himself almost incapable of any motion. He bled at the nose a pale and watery blood, and was continually foaming at the mouth: attacked too with a diarrhœa, his excrements came from him without his perceiving it; the flux of his seed was continual; his eyes bleared, dim, or extinguished, had lost their faculty of motion; his pulse was extremely low, yet quick and frequent; his breathing very laborious, his leanness excessive, except just in his feet, which began to be œdematous. The disorder of his mind was not less than that of his body; without ideas, without memory, without reflections, without anxiety about his fate, without any other sensation but that of a pain which returned with every fit, at least once in three days. A being much below that of a brute; a sight, of which there is no conception can reach the horror. It was not easy to make out that he had ever belonged to the human species. I procured for him quickly enough the relief of destroying those violent convulsive fits, which recalled him to the power of feeling, only by the pain they brought with them; but satisfied with having mitigated his tortures, I discontinued remedies, which could have no efficacy on the main of his disorder. He died at the end of a few weeks, in June, 1757, œdematous all over his body.