Pathologizing leaky male bodies: Spermatorrhea in nineteenth-century british medicine and popular anatomical museums

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 431-438

  Stephens, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ART; ARTICLE; AUDIOVISUAL EQUIPMENT; ECONOMICS; EJACULATORY DUCT; ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION; ETHNOLOGY; EXERCISE; GENITAL SYSTEM DISEASE; HISTORY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; HUMAN; INFORMATION CENTER; LEGAL ASPECT; MALE; MASTURBATION; MEN'S HEALTH; MENTAL DISEASE; MENTAL HEALTH; PATIENT; PHYSICIAN; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PSYCHOSEXUAL DISORDER; SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION; THERAPY; UNITED KINGDOM;

EJACULATORY DUCTS; ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION; EXERCISE; GENITAL DISEASES, MALE; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMAN BODY; HUMANS; MALE; MASTURBATION; MEN'S HEALTH; MENTAL DISORDERS; MENTAL HEALTH; MODELS, ANATOMIC; MUSEUMS; PATIENTS; PHYSICIANS; SEX CHARACTERISTICS; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION, PHYSIOLOGICAL; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTIONS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; THERAPEUTICS;

EID: 63249103671     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Dr. Kahn, Handbook of Dr Kahn's Museum (London: W. Snell, 1863), 180.
2. Albert H. Hayes, The Science of Life; or, Self-Preservation. A Medical Treatise on Nervous and Physical Disability, Spermatorrhoea, Impotence and Sterility (Boston: Peabody Medical Institute, 1868), 121.
3. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, "Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhea Panic," Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 3 (2003): 365-99;
4. Robert Darby, A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
5. Rosenman, "Body Doubles," 366.
6. Claude-François Lallemand, Des pertes séminales involontaires, 3 vols. (Paris: Béchet jeune, 1836-42).
7. John Milton, On Spermatorrhoea: Its Results and Complications, 9th ed. (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1872), 5.
8. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 298.
9. M. Lallemand, A Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea, trans. Henry J. McDougall (London: John Churchill, 1847).
10. Lallemand, Des pertes séminales involontaires, 7.
11. John Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1786), 206. Hunter's inclusion of involuntary ejaculation within an account of venereal disease itself follows a long tradition. As Robert Darby notes, as far back as Galen the term gonorrhea had been used "to cover both losses of semen and discharges arising from infection, and this confusing double usage persisted until the eighteenth century" ("Pathologizing Male Sexuality: Lallemand, Spermatorrhea, and the Rise of Circumcision," Journal of the History of Medicine 60 [2005]: 286 n. 13). In fact, this use of "gonorrhoea" can still be found in the popular medical literature on spermatorrhea in the mid-nineteenth century.
12. This has been an extraordinarily enduring concept: more than fifteen hundred years later, the eighteenth-century physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot reconfirmed this view in Onanism by arguing that excessive ejaculation through masturbation weakened and feminized men, causing them to become mentally as well as physically feeble (Onanism: A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Masturbation, trans. A. Hume [1723; New York: Garland, 1985]). This is because, as he argues by citing classical views of ejaculate, semen is "extracted from the head" (Hippocrates, quoted on 48), a "portion of the brain" (Akmaeon, quoted on 50), and a "running of the spinal marrow" (Plato, quoted on 51).
13. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 11, 18.
14. Rosenman, "Body Doubles," 373.
15. John Skelton, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease and Spermatorrhoea (Leeds: Samuel Moxon, 1857), 108.
16. Kahn, Handbook, 120-23.
17. Robert Bartholow, Spermatorrhoea: Its Causes, Symptoms, Results and Treatment, 4th ed. (New York: William Wood and Co., 1879), 5.
18. Ibid., 6.
19. John Milton, Practical Remarks on the Treatment of Spermatorrhoea and Some Forms of Impotence (London: S. Highley, 1854), 6.
20. Skelton, A Treatise, 116.
21. Bartholow, Spermatorrhoea, 78-79, 93-95.
22. Rosenman, "Body Doubles," 376.
23. Kahn, Handbook, 75.
24. Ibid., 81.
25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. 163-67.
26. Kahn, Handbook, 77.
27. Ibid., 75.
28. Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3.
29. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 125-31.
30. Lancet, 26 April 1851, 474.
31. Lancet, 13 April 1853, 156.
32. Kahn, Handbook, front leaf.
33. Karl Pearson identified Kahn as a qualified medical doctor who had taught at the University of Vienna, although he did not provide his source for this information ("Laplace," Biometrika 21 [1929]: 202-16).
34. Lancet, 15 August 1857, 175.
35. Ibid. The Society for the Suppression of Vice was a government agency established in 1802 out of the Royal Proclamation Society, which was initiated in 1787 "for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality."
36. Lancet, 5 September 1857, 251.
37. Lancet, 28 November 1857, 558.
38. Pearson, "Laplace," 214.
39. Alan Bates, "Dr Kahn's Museum: Obscene Anatomy in Victorian London," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99, no. 12 (2006): 618-24, at 623.
40. As Bates notes, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which made it illegal for anatomical museums to publish or distribute texts on sexual health or disease and which was followed by the Medical Act of 1858, which regulated the practice of medicine, led directly to the closure of public anatomy museums (ibid., 621).
41. Milton, Practical Remarks, 2.
42. Dr. Pickford, On True and False Spermatorrhoea, trans. Francis Burdett Courtenay, 3rd ed. (London: H. Bailliere, 1854), 6.
43. Bartholow, Spermatorrhoea, iv.
44. Darby, A Surgical Temptation, 83, 14.
45. Elizabeth Grosz, recognizing the "implicit association" of "the fluid, the viscous, the half-formed" with femininity, questions whether "men's refusal to acknowledge the effects of flows that move through the various parts of the body ⋯ ha[s] to do with men's attempt to distance themselves from the very kind of corporeality-uncontrollable, excessive, expansive, disruptive, irrational-they have attributed to women?" (Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism [Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1994], 195, 200).
46. Rosenman, "Body Doubles," 375.
47. See, for example, Mark Whalan, "'Taking Myself in Hand': Jean Toomer and Physical Culture," Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 4 (2003): 597-615;
48. Michael Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997);
49. and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, "Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain," Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 595-610.