The Meaning of Things by A.C. Grayling

Author:A.C. Grayling [Grayling, A.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780221168
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

Sin

Oh Lord, it is not the sins I hare committed that I regret but those which I have had no opportunity to commit.

GHALIB

In its efforts to control a life-threatening practice whose effects are a degenerative progression from weakness and nervous exhaustion through blindness to madness and death, the medical profession once prescribed chloral hydrate, potassium bromide and opium for onset cases, and for more serious cases digitalis, strychnine (‘which may be safer when mixed with small doses of arsenic,’ said one helpful practitioner) and orally administered hydrochloric acid. If this did not work, the next resort was the application of leeches to the thighs, blistering or scalding of the peritoneum or genitals, and application of electric currents to those organs. When all else failed, surgical intervention in the form of infibulation of the prepuce, circumcision, castration or clitoridectomy was indicated. To ensure that the practice in question would not begin at all, parents were advised to stitch the sleeves of their children’s nightgowns to the bedcovers, or tie their ankles to opposite sides of the crib, or make them wear a thick towel or nappy.

The practice, of course, was masturbation, regarded with horror and dread by moralists and medical men from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In some circles the belief that masturbation is enfeebling and causes a variety of nervous and sexual disorders persists. The origin of this lunacy was religious, and principally Christian, dread of sex and sexual feelings, which in the medieval and Renaissance world focused on melancholia, leprosy, syphilis and plague as divine punishments for sin and especially sexual sin, and in modern times (that is, from the seventeenth century onwards) expressed itself in theories about the medical dangers of any form of excess, ‘perversion’ or ‘self-abuse’. A rather simple conceptual shift was at work: ideas of ‘uncleanness’ and ‘pollution’ in the moral sense became medicalised into physical forms, as infection, degeneration and corruption of the body and mind. The Catholic Church taught that masturbation is worse than rape because at least the latter might result in conception. The same moral premise is at work in the Catholic claim that contraception is bad for health (although, illogically, Catholics do not see celibacy as likewise unhealthy).

Christian moralising is tragically blameable for a vast degree of suffering caused by its absurd attitudes to sex. Leave aside the psychological tortures of frustration, anxiety and guilt, distorted or truncated sexuality, and the harm done by damming the natural outlets of sexual expression, and consider a single example: the treatment of those who fell victim to syphilis when it appeared in Europe in the early sixteenth century.

The ‘pox’ spread rapidly, afflicting victims with painful and foully suppurating sores that ate away flesh and bone, eroding lips, noses and palates to give sufferers a hideous appearance. Many died at the first onset of the disease in this form; for those who survived, longer-term horrors awaited in the form of bone deformations and insanity before death released them.

The church’s response was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.