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Acton
Cures Masturbatory Diseases
England, 1857. William Acton, a successful physician with a
thriving practice, published his 1857 Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive System to alert men of the dangers of sexual excess. At every
stage of male development from boyhood to the decrepitude of old age, he wrote,
sexual excess in myriad forms can derail health, lead to impotence and disease, and even
kill. With proper medical intervention, some of the disorders that result from
sexual impropriety can be treated, but only if the patient doesn't wait too long before
consulting his physician.
Dangerous Desires
According to Acton, the perils of sexual
excess begin well before puberty. Normal healthy boyhood "should be attended by
complete repose of the generative [sexual] functions, unbroken by anything like intense
feeling for their employment." Otherwise, the prepubescent boy is likely to
develop masturbatory habits that will weaken him and ruin his health later in life.
The book enjoins caregivers to vigilantly watch any boy in their care to be sure that he
avoids self-stimulation, a practice that will shock his nervous system so dangerously that
it "menaces his dawning manhood." If caregivers discover that a child has
masturbatory tendencies, or a precocious interest in girls, preventive treatment is the
best course. Exercise helps, and at night, the child's hands should be tightly
bandaged to prevent him from stimulating his genitalia and awakening his "animal
passions."
The most serious risk arises at puberty when "'life is in excess:
the blood boils, the desires are impetuous and tormenting.'" If a boy
has been well brought up, according to Acton, he will be able to resist the flood of
sexual desire that accompanies his burgeoning manhood, but if not, he will blindly follow
his inclinations and masturbate habitually. The boy who masturbates before puberty
damages his nervous system, since sex always shocks the brain's delicate tissues, but the
adolescent suffers even more. Like Tissot nearly 100 years
before, Acton believed that semen is an almost magical substance, and whenever it is
"spent," an amount of "vigor" is lost. The body works hard to
restore itself, but masturbators always overuse their organs and the body's restorative
powers can't keep up. If the youth fails to overcome his "vicious
propensities," he will suffer "the haggard expression, the sunken eye, the long,
cadaverous- looking countenance, the downcast look which seems to arise from the dread of
looking a fellow-creature in the eye" and a permanent loss of intellectual
ability. In some rare cases, a boy will be so overwhelmed by his passions that he
masturbates himself to death.
The healthy youth, according to Acton, is the exact opposite of the
nervous masturbator. He is the athletic, virile and vigorous master of his sexual
instincts whose intellect functions at full capacity. When treating masturbators,
the doctor's task is to convert the cowardly masturbator into just such a specimen of
health. First and foremost, the masturbating teen must stop. Exercise
helps,
and if irritations of the penis or hemorrhoids exist, they must be treated aggressively
since such irritations can spur prurient attention to sexual regions of the body.
The afflicted youth should be "taught to look upon masturbation as a cowardly,
selfish, debasing habit "and encouraged to pursue "manly amusements compatible
with health." If the combination of exercise and shaming leads to the
cessation of the "evil habit," the patient's system will rally, although his
intellectual functions may never fully recover.
New dangers lurk in adulthood. Early marriage is a good antidote for
sexual desire, and it allows a man to fulfill his mission as father and master of his
household, but even marital intercourse can be taken too far. Acton never quite said
how much sex is good - presumably it depended on the strength of a man's constitution -
but he repeatedly warned that three times a week is way too often, and the consequences
are severe. The husband who overindulges, or masturbates, or becomes aroused too
often is likely to develop spermatorrhea, a tragic disorder that results in "general
debility, inaptitude to work, disinclination for sexual intercourse" and ultimately
impotence. Acton reported that the disease can take several forms. The most
obvious is nocturnal emissions, or wet dreams, but in a more pernicious form, sperm
escapes unseen when a man urinates. The same awful consequences that beset
masturbating youths can befall the adult spermatorrheic unless he is treated by a
knowledgeable physician.
The treatment of spermatorrhea seems to have been Acton's specialty.
He developed an elaborate course that began with a cessation of excessive sex and a
diet that sharply limited meat and alcohol, but favored stale bread. Beyond sexual
and dietary restrictions, Acton recommended daily baths, exercise, cold enemas, and a
hard mattress. If this regimen did not suffice, Acton was ready with a more extreme
measure: chemical cautery of the urethra, a procedure that employed the
apparatus pictured on the right. Tube A was inserted into the patient's urethra and
a caustic solution was injected by pressing the plunger of syringe B, all without the
benefit of anesthesia. The operation burned the lining of the entire urethra, and
Acton was happy with the results. "I very rarely have occasion to repeat the
procedure," he wrote. It seems that after one urethral cautery, his patients
never complained about spermatorrhea again.
Frightening Bodies
Masturbation is harmless and spermatorrhea
does not exist. Why, then, did Acton issue such graphic warnings about the
consequences of spilt semen? On the surface, his book alerted readers to specific
dangers that Acton truly believed in, but the message he was preaching was broader.
In Acton's opinion, a penis improperly deployed is as dangerous as a pistol in the hands
of a novice. Either can produce accidental self-destruction. Expert guidance
is the only protector against dire unintended consequences, and Functions and
Disorders was just the guide men needed.
Acton was not alone when he asserted that the human body is dangerous
terrain. Other doctors wrote of the dangers of constipation, the importance of a
medically approved diet, and other practices that would prolong life and prevent disease.
Many of their recommendations were just as silly, and some just as harmful, as
Acton's Caustic Cautery. If physicians were to be believed, such commonplace
activities as eating, drinking and sex could go dangerously wrong if done incorrectly.
Whatever their stated intentions, Acton and his ilk used scare tactics to expand the
market for medical services.
Masturbation had once been considered a sin with consequences in the
hereafter, but Acton and other sex doctors followed in Tissot's
tradition, and warned that sex was dangerous not just to their patient's eternal souls,
but to their immediate health. Doctors like Acton appointed themselves the new
guardians of a morality rooted in a medical science they invented. The strategy
worked well for Acton. The Lancet, perhaps the most prestigious medical
journal in Britain, welcomed his book as a courageous and enlightening treatise that
brought a once ignored topic to the attention of physicians, and Acton's own practice
thrived. By the 1880s, he was so respected as a sex expert that his opinion was
sought when parliament passed legislation to contain the spread of venereal diseases by
prostitutes.
Acton's theories, and their success in building his reputation and career,
foreshadowed the medicalization of homosexuality at the hands of men like Westphal and Krafft-Ebing. They, too,
enjoyed the financial and reputational benefits of treating medical disorders that did not
exist.
Notes, References, and Further Reading
Photo Credits
"Acton on the Reproductive Organs" is
from the binding of Acton, 1857.
"Acton's Cautery" is from an illustration in Acton, 1857, p. 87.
Notes
For more on the masturbation scares circa 1850,
see Porter and Hall, 1995, esp. pp.145-153.
All quotations are from Acton, 1857 except where
noted. Acton's description of the consequences of spermatorrhea are from a citation
in Marcus, 1966.
References
Acton, William, 1857. The Functions
and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life.
London: John Churchill.
Marcus, Stephen, 1966. The Other
Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Porter, Roy, and Lesley Hall, 1995. The Facts of
Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Weeks, Jeffrey, 1981. Sex, Politics
and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London:
Longman.
Weeks, Jeffrey, 1990. Coming Out:
Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Revised
Edition. London: Quartet Books.
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© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
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