Histories of Sexology by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030658137
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Tensions and Partnership

Masturbation: Mortal Sin, Morbid Vice

During the eighteenth century, as historians such as Thomas Laqueur have demonstrated, masturbation became an obsession in western medicine (Stengers and Anne Van Neck 1984; Laqueur 2004). Traditionally defined as a sin, masturbation, then referred to as onanism, came to be considered a vice and pathology which could cause death by exhaustion, mostly among men, who were supposed to be more tempted by this practice than women. In Spain, the translation of a well-known essay on the subject, which was published in 1760 by the Swiss doctor Samuel Auguste Tissot (1760), appeared later than in other European countries due to medical censorship (González de Pablo and Perdiguero Gil 1990). The first authorized edition dates from 1807. Tissot’s text was nevertheless known earlier, as proved by this definition published in Antonio Ballano’s Dictionary of Medical Sciences published in 1805:Onanism: “the excessive, solitary and irregular use of the reproductive abilities. Two evils arise from this horrible abuse, one provoking irritation of the nerves, another starvation or exhaustion as a consequence of excessive evacuation. Its physical consequences are paleness, exhaustion, extreme thinness, apoplexy [coma], lethargy, tremors, paralysis, blindness and deafness, spasms, gout [arthritis], tabes dorsalis,1 tuberculosis, and eventually, death; and its moral consequences are memory loss, laziness, inertia, stupidity, melancholy, and eventually, insanity. Those are the fruits harvested by the unhappy victims of this atrocious vice”. (Ballano 1805, p. 96)

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