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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“I am sensible (a patient writes me) that this wretched practice has diminished the strength of my intellectual faculties, and especially of my memory[35].”

I beg leave to insert here the fragments of some letters, which, combined together, will form a complete enough description of the natural disorders produced by self-pollution. The language in which I wrote (the Latin) hindered me from making use of them in the first edition of this work.

“I had the misfortune (says the same person, who was by this time arrived at the age of maturity,) like too many other young people, to suffer myself to be carried away by the violence of a habit, as pernicious for the body as for the soul. Age, indeed, assisted by reason, has, for some time past, corrected this wretched inclination: but the ill is done. The disorder and extraordinary sensibility of the nervous system, and the accidents resulting therefrom, are accompanied with a weakness, a restlessness, a tædium vitæ, a sense of distress, that all seem to vie with each other to afflict me. I am consumed by an almost continued loss of seed. My face is become as it were cadaverous, so pale, so livid. The weakness of my body renders all my motions laborious: that of my legs is often so great, that they can hardly support me, and that I dare not go out of my room. My digestions are so ill performed, that my aliments come from me, scarcely more altered, three or four hours after I have taken them, than when I took them into my stomach. My breast gets stuffed with phlegm, the load of which throws me into a state of anguish, and my expectorations into a state of faintness. Here you have a succinct account of my causes of complaint, which are still aggravated by the melancholic certainty I have acquired, that every day will yet be worse than the precedent ones. In a word, I cannot conceive that a human creature can be afflicted with greater evils than I am. Without the particular grace of Providence, I could hardly bear up under so heavy a load.”