Pathologizing male sexuality: Lallemand, spermatorrhea, and the rise of circumcision

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 283-319

  Darby, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Cauterization; Circumcision; Claude Fran ois Lallemand; Gonorrhea; Male sexuality; Quackery; Spermatorrhea; William Acton

Indexed keywords

CIRCUMCISION; FRANCE; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; HUMAN; IMPOTENCE; MALE; MALE GENITAL SYSTEM; MASTURBATION; PATHOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; REVIEW; SEXUALITY; SPERMATOZOON; UNITED KINGDOM;

CIRCUMCISION, MALE; ENGLAND; FRANCE; GENDER IDENTITY; GENITALIA, MALE; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; IMPOTENCE; MALE; MASTURBATION; SEXUALITY; SPERMATOZOA;

EID: 21444433336     PISSN: 00225045     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jri042     Document Type: Review

References (177)

1. James Smythe, "Miscellaneous Contributions to Pathology and Therapeutics: Impo tence and Sterility," Lancet, 26 August 1841, 779-85, p. 784;
2. Marris Wilson, "Contributions to the Physiology, Pathology and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea," Lancet, 1856, 2, 644;
3. T. C. Worsley, Flannelled Fool: A Slice of Life in the Thirties (London: Alan Ross, 1967), p. 37.
4. M.Jeanne Peterson, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 244 fn.
5. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 211, 214.
6. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 139-45.
7. Ivan Crozier, "William Acton and the History of Sexuality: The Medical and Professional Context," J. Victorian Culture, 2000, 5, 16-20.
8. Ellen Rosenman, "Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhoea Panic," J. Hist. Sexuality, 2003, 12, 365-99, pp. 365-66.
9. Masturbation in the eighteenth century is now well covered by Jean Stengers and Anne van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
10. Michael Stolberg, "An Unmanly Vice: Self-Pollution, Anxiety and the Body in the Eighteenth Century," Soc. Hist. Med., 2000, 13, 1-21;
11. Stolberg, "Self-Pollution, Moral Reform and the Venereal Trade: Notes on the Sources and Historical Context of Onania," J. Hist. Sexuality, 2000, 9, 37-61;
12. and Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). The nineteenth century awaits equally detailed study,
13. but see Lesley Hall, "Forbidden by God, Despised by Men: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic and Manhood in Great Britain, 1850-1950," in Forbidden History: The State, Society and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
14. Alan Hunt, "The Great Masturbation Panic and the Discourse of Moral Regulation in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain," J. Hist. Sexuality, 1998, 8, 575-615;
15. and Robert Darby, "Circumcision as a Preventive of Masturbation: A Review of the Historiography," J. Soc. Hist., 2003, 36, 737-58.
16. Mason, Making of Victorian Sexuality, p. 211.
17. F. B. Courtenay, On Spermatorrhoea and Certain Functional Derangements and Debilities of the Generative System: Their Nature, Treatment and Cure, 11th ed. (London: Baillière, Tindall, 1878), p. 1.
18. W. D. Dunsmuir and E. M. Gordon, "The History of Circumcision," B.J.U. Intl., 1999, 83, supp. 1, 1-12;
19. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), ch. 3;
20. Ornella Moscucci, "Clitoridectomy, Circumcision and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain," in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, ed. Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996);
21. and David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000), ch. 4.
22. Robert Darby, " 'A Source of Serious Mischief: The Demonisation of the Foreskin and the Rise of Preventive Circumcision in Australia," in Understanding Circumcision: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to a Multi-Dimensional Problem, ed. George C. Denniston, Frederick Hodges, and Marilyn Milos (London and New York: Kluwer Academic and Plenum Press, 2001).
23. C. J. Cold and J. R. Taylor, "The Prepuce," B.J.U. Intl., 1999, 83, supp. 1, 134-44;
24. Geoffrey Miller, "Circumcision: Cultural-Legal Analysis," Virginia J Soc. Pol. Law, 2002, 9, 497-585.
25. Galen had used the term gonorrhea to cover both losses of semen and discharges arising from infection, and this confusing double usage persisted until the eighteenth century. See Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen on the Affected Parts (Basel: J. Karger, 1976), p. 223. In the Middle Ages, gonorrhea could mean both involuntary losses of semen and urethral infections. According to Jacquart and Thomasset, the abundant literature on the former condition was related to theological concerns about nocturnal emissions and masturbation. As in the nineteenth century, it was difficult to distinguish between the two problems, but one authority suggested that the four elements that distinguished the masturbatory from the physiological form were lewd imaginings, a warm and dry complexion, flatulence (thought to cause erections), and the presence of spermatic matter in the discharge. The most common treatment was attention to diet, especially the avoidance of beans.
26. Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), pp. 148ff., 180.
27. Stolberg, "An Unmanly Vice," pp. 48-49.
28. I b i d.
29. John Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes, 6th ed. (1709; New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), pp. 386, 392-93.
30. Onania: Or the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves by This Abominable Practice (c. 1716) (Boston, 1724);
31. facsimile reprint in The Secret Vice Exposed: Some Arguments against Masturbation (New York: Arno, 1974), pp. 17-18. It was an impressive charge sheet, much copied over the next 200 years but hardly original even then. Michael Stolberg has shown that it was cribbed from
32. John Marten's Treatise of Venereal Diseases, particularly the 6th (1708-9) and 7th editions (1711), which included a long discussion of the physical consequences of masturbation, including "gonorrhoea," phimosis, paraphimosis, and thin "inelaborate" semen. See
33. "An Unmanly Vice," pp. 49-50.
34. Samuel-Auguste Tissot, Onanism: A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Masturbation (1758; New York, 1832);
35. facsimile reprint in The Secret Vice Exposed, pp. 32, 37-45.
36. Ibid., p. 45.
37. Ibid., p. 37.
38. For an introduction to nerve force theory, see Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 80-100;
39. and Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modem Era (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 19-46.
40. "Young men afflicted with this disorder [a continual efflux of a "thin, cold, colourless substance"] . . . become old in habit of body, slow, languid, spiritless, dull, silent, feeble, wrinkled, unactive, pale, white, effeminate, of a weak appetite, cold, with a heaviness of the limbs and a numbness of the legs, weak, lazy and indisposed to all manner of action. In many it is the forerunner of the palsy; for how is it possible for the nerves not to suffer under the decay of their forces, when nature . . . is infrigidated? since it is the vital seed which makes us men, hot, robust, hairy, of a strong and deep voice, bold and courageous, and fit to contrive any enterprise." Quoted in Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary: Including Physic, Surgery, Anatomy, Chymistry, and Botany, in all their Branches Relative to Medicine, 3 vols. (London: T. Osborne, 1743-45), II, Gonorrhoea (1), from chap. V, "On Gonorrhoea," from "On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases."
41. This can be found in The Extant Works ofAretaeus the Cappadodan (1856; Boston: Milford House, 1972), pp. 346-47.
42. James, Gonorrhoea (1).
43. John Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London, 1786), pp. 206-8.
44. Richard Dawson, An Essay on Spermatorrhoea and Urinary Deposits; with Observations on the Nature, Cause and Treatment of the Various Disorders of the Generative System, 6th ed. (London: Aylott and Jones, 1852), p. 34.
45. Marris Wilson, "Contributions to the Physiology, Pathology and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea," Lancet, 1856, 2, 215-17, 300-302, 482-84, 643-44; and
46. Lancet, 1857, 1, 376-77. Here,
47. see part 4, 1856, p. 643.
48. J. D. Oriel, Scars of Venus: A History of Venereology (London: Springer, 1994), p. 104;
49. and H. L. Wehrbein, "Therapy in Gonorrhoea: An Historical Review," Ann. Med. Hist., 1935, NS 8, 492-97.
50. William Acton, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Urinary and Generative Organs (in Both Sexes), 2nd ed. (London: Churchill, 1851), pp. 88-91, 102-3, 255-56.
51. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1936), 1,
52. Auto-Erotism, p. 249.
53. He named Voltaire because of an entry ascribed to his Philosophical Dictionary. On Lallemand
54. see Frederick Hodges, "A Short History of Involuntary Sexual Mutilation in the United States," in Sexual Mutilations: A Human Tragedy, ed. George C. Denniston and Marilyn Milos (New York: Plenum Press, 1997);
55. and the brief but accurate summary found online at www.whonamedit.com.
56. Anonymous, review of the English translation of Les Pertes Seminales, J. Psychol. Med. Ment. Pathol., 1849, 2, 1-30, quotes on pp. 18, 2.
57. Claude-François Lallemand, A Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea, trans. and ed. Henry J. McDougall, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1858), p. 34.
58. Ibid., p. 33.
59. Ibid., p. 126.
60. Ibid., p. 161.
61. Ibid., p. 143.
62. Ibid., p. 290.
63. Ibid., pp. 153-54.
64. Patrick Singy, "Friction of the Genitals and Secularisation of Morality," J. Hist. Sexuality, 2003, 12, 345-64.
65. Lallemand, Practical Treatise, p. 185.
66. Ibid., p. 33.
67. The leading French medical dictionary from the period defines marasme as a drying up, withering, and emaciation of the body, often associated with decrepitude and senility. It was not a disease in itself but an effect of diseases such as dysentery or consumption. Lallemand's distance from the medical orthodoxy of his day may be judged from the comment that marasme had many causes, but not "excessive losses of semen and other fluids" unless prolonged beyond a critical point. Charles Panckoucke, Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales (Paris, 1812-22), vol. 31, pp. 1-4, viewed at online at www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/ niedica/panckoucke.htm, 19 June 2004.
68. Lallemand, Practical Treatise, p. 154.
69. Ibid., p. 296.
70. Ibid., pp. 154-55.
71. Ibid., p. 315.
72. Ibid., p. 314.
73. Ibid., p. 171.
74. Ibid., pp. 213-44.
75. Even by those who claim that their advocacy of routine infant circumcision is strictly scientific; see Brian Morris, In Favour of Circumcision (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999), p. 57.
76. Lallemand, Practical Treatise, p. 214.
77. J. R. Taylor et al., "The Prepuce: Specialized Mucosa of the Penis and Its Loss to Circumcision," Br. J. Urol., 1996, 77, 291-95.
78. Lallemand, Practical Treatise, p. 220.
79. Ibid., pp. 220-21.
80. Ibid., pp. 221-22.
81. Ibid., p. 223.
82. Ibid., p. 223.
83. Gollaher, Circumcision, ch. 4.
84. Lallemand, Practical Treatise, pp. 214-15.
85. Ibid., p. 224.
86. James Copland, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1844-58), III, "Pollution," pp. 442-45.
87. Mason, Making of Victorian Sexuality, pp. 297-98.
88. Porter and Hall, Facts of Life, pp. 141-44.
89. Crozier, "William Acton," p. 7.
90. Benjamin Phillips, "Observations on Seminal and Other Discharges from the Urethra," London Med. Gazette, 1842-43, NS 1, 451.
91. Benjamin Phillips, "Further Remarks on Spermatic Discharges," London Med. Gazette, 1845, NS 1, 17-19.
92. Benjamin Phillips, "Clinical Observations . . . on Urethral Affections," London Med. Gazette, 1847, NS 4, 177.
93. Benjamin Phillips, "Further Observations on Spermatic Discharges," London Med. Gazette, 1848, NS 6, 489-93.
94. Henry Thompson, "Nitrate of Silver in Spermatorrhoea," Lancet, 1852, 1, 389.
95. Wilson, 1856, part I, p. 216.
96. Wilson, 1856, part I, pp. 215-16.
97. John L. Milton, "On the Nature and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea, " Lancet, 1854, 1, 243-46, 269-70, 467-68, 595-96;
98. part I, p. 245.
99. Ibid., p. 244.
100. John L. Milton, "Spermatorrhoea," Med. Times Gazette, 1852, NS 4, 241-42. Milton is known today as the inventor of various spiked penis rings, chastity cages, and electric alarms that rang a bell in the event of an erection, intended to be worn at night to prevent both nocturnal emissions and willful manipulation.
101. See Porter and Hall, Facts of Life, p. 144;
102. and Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers: Some Curious Preoccupations of the Medical Profession (London: Nelson, 1967), pp. 97, 103, illust. p. 105.
103. Dawson, Essay, p. 13.
104. Ibid., pp. 26-27.
105. George Drysdale, The Elements of Social Science, or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion (1855), 35th ed. (London: G. Standring, 1905), pp. 102-3.
106. Drysdale, Elements of Social Science, pp. 93-94;
107. and J. Miriam Benn, Predicaments of Love (London: Pluto Press, 1992), ch. 6.
108. Drysdale rejected circumcision, and in opposition to Jonathan Hutchinson's urging that it be performed on infants as a prophylaxis against syphilis, he daringly proposed that promiscuous men use condoms. See Elements, pp. 135-37, 155-56.
109. William Acton, Prostitution, ed. Peter Fryer, 2nd ed. (1870; New York: Praeger, 1969),?. 11.
110. Acton, Practical Treatise, pp. 222-58.
111. Ibid., p. 224.
112. Ibid., p. 236.
113. Ibid., p. 237.
114. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves; Shorter, Front Paralysis to Fatigue.
115. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life, 3rd ed. (1862; Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1865), p. 206.
116. Acton, Functions and Disorders, 6th ed. (1875; London: Churchill, 1903), p. 39.
117. Acton, Functions and Disorders, 3rd ed., p. 90.
118. Ibid., pp. 207-10.
119. Ibid., p. 212.
120. Ibid., pp. 219-29.
121. Ibid., p. 225.
122. J. A. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 64.
123. Symonds was case 17 in Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (1897), printed as an appendix to his memoirs.
124. Symonds, Memoirs, p. 154.
125. Ibid., p. 287.
126. Acton, Practical Treatise, p. 233.
127. Ibid., pp. 69-70. Acton attributed these comments to Philippe Ricord in the course of a lecture, but a search of his publications has failed to find it, and the sentiment is in sharp contradiction with his other remarks about the foreskin. The comment is far more typical of Lallemand, Acton's other teacher.
128. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 13.
129. Acton, Functions and Disorders, 3rd ed., p. 21.
130. I b i d.
131. Ibid., p. 22.
132. Ibid., footnote.
133. Acton, Functions and Disorders, 6th ed., p. 7. For a discussion of why Acton did not advocate circumcision, see
134. Robert Darby, "William Acton's Antipodean Disciples: A Colonial Perspective on His Theories of Male Sexual (Dys)function," J. Hist. Sexuality, 2004, 13, 157-82.
135. Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (London: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), pp. 133-34;
136. Hall, "Forbidden by God";
137. and Hunt, "Great Masturbation Panic."
138. D. C. B., "Quack Advertisements," Lancet, 1870, 2, 72.
139. "Sexual disorders" (Editorial), Lancet, 1870, 2, 90.
140. Ibid., p. 125.
141. Copland introduced the idea that "the neglect of circumcision in Christian countries" was a common cause of masturbation and praised the descendants of Abraham and the "followers of Mahomet" for perpetuating "an enduring and healthy race" as one of the "beneficial results of circumcision." He argued that persons who lacked the willpower to restrain immoral impulses were often really the victims of "physical conditions and local irritations," meaning that vicious behavior like masturbation was more the result of their physical makeup than a failure of will: "The occurrence of this vice is remarkably favoured by the physical condition of the male genitals, especially as regards the neglect of circumcision. I am convinced that the abrogation of this rite among Christians has been injurious to them, in religious, in moral, in physical, and in sanitory [sic] and constitutional points of view, - that circumcision is a most salutary rite." Copland, Dictionary, III, pp. 442, 445.
142. "Sexual Disorders," Lancet, 1870, 2, 159.
143. I b i d.
144. I b i d.
145. John Erichsen, The Science and Art of Surgery, Being a Treatise on Surgical Injuries, Diseases and Operations, 7th ed., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1877), II, p. 974.
146. Ibid., p. 975.
147. Ibid., p. 977.
148. Ibid., pp. 976-77. Erichsen's analysis suggests the truth of Rosenman's suggestion ("Body Doubles," p. 368) that surgeons saw spermatorrhea as a two-stage disease. In the first the body was overactive in its production of sperm, with frequent nocturnal emissions, premature ejaculation, and emissions at stool or when horse riding. In the second exhaustion set in: The testicles shrank, semen (or something) dribbled with neither erection nor sensation or escaped with the urine, and the patients complained of depression and langor. But the fact that the first was encountered in young men and the second in old suggests, insofar as the observations were true, that they were registering nothing more than the usual transition from young and horny to old and losing it as a man aged - again emphasizing that spermatorrhea was little more than normal male sexuality.
149. Courtenay, On Spermatorrhoea.
150. "On Spermatorrhoea," Med. Press and Circular, 21 June 1871, 541.
151. Thomas K. Chambers, "Gonorrhoea and Imaginary Spermatorrhoea," Lancet, 1861, 1, 635-37. It is hard to know why Dawson did not apply the usual silver nitrate in this case. In his
152. Essay on Spermatorrhoea (pp. 93-94) he explained that the iodine-zinc chloride mixture was to treat enlargement of the prostate.
153. Chambers, "Gonorrhoea," p. 637.
154. George Gascoyen, "On Spermatorrhoea and Its Treatment," Br. Med. J., 1871, 1, 67-69, 95-96.
155. Ibid., pp. 67-68.
156. Ibid., p. 68.
157. I b i d.
158. Ibid., p. 95.
159. Ibid., pp. 95-96.
160. Ibid., p. 95.
161. But not so strongly as would justify M. Jeanne Peterson calling him "Mr. Acton's enemy." A careful reading of her principal source for this view, his lecture "Sexual Hypochondriasis," reveals that he agreed with Acton on nine points and disagreed on seven. The most important of these was his outright denial, most unusual for his time and profession, that masturbation caused organic disease or insanity. See M. Jeanne Peterson, "Dr. Acton's Enemy: Medicine, Sex and Society in Victorian England," Victorian Studies, 1986, 29, 569-90;
162. and James Paget "Sexual Hypochondriasis," in Clinical Lectures and Essays, ed. Howard March, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1879), pp. 268-91.
163. Ibid., pp. 276-77.
164. Ibid., p. 279.
165. Ibid., p. 280.
166. Michael Worboys, "Unsexing Gonorrhoea: Bacteriologists, Gynaecologists, and Suffragists in Britain, 1860-1920," Soc. Hist. Med., 2004, 17, 41-59.
167. H. Coupland Taylor, "The Treatment of Spermatorrhoea," Br. Med. J., 1883, 1, 562.
168. Adrift (pseud.), "Spermatorrhoea" (letter), Br. Med. J., 1883, 1, 389.
169. Robert Maguire, A Practical Treatise on Urinary and Renal Disorders (London: Smith Elder, 1885), pp. 167-71.
170. Richard Quain, A Dictionary of Medicine, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans Green, 1894), pp. 787-88.
171. Henry Morris, "Injuries and Diseases of the Testes, Scrotum and Penis," in A System of Surgery, ed. Frederick Treves, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1895-96), II, pp. 970-71.
172. Quain, Dictionary, p. v.
173. Harmsworth's Home Doctor and Encyclopaedia of Good Health (London: Educational Book, n.d. [c. 1926]), pp. 1057-58.
174. J. Arthur Cooper, The Sexual Disabilities of Man, 4th ed. (London: H. K. Lewis, 1920), pp. 129-30.
175. Ibid., p. 192.
176. Ibid., p. 134.
177. Ibid., p. 185.