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Masturbation ... supposed cures in Victorian times.. funny times
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Masturbation ... supposed cures in Victorian times.. funny times Masturbation in the Victorian era was not acceptable behavior. It was a sin that robbed the spirit, decayed health, and led to insanity. In a report presented to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1848, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum at Worcester estimated that 32 percent of the asylum’s patients were insane because of self-pollution. Similar figures were released by asylums around the country until the twentieth century. The masturbator was easily identified. Plague spots, dark or blue spots under the eyes, were telltale evidence of a self-polluter. As one doctor put it, “they were the outward sign[s] of a morally bankrupt individual.” But to the knowledgeable, many other clues indicated a possible self-abuser. Precocious physical development in an adolescent might very well have been triggered by masturbation. sliding on poles or trees were suspect. Tight-fitting clothes, dancing, or working long hours without proper exercise were also evidence of possible physical mistreatment. The best preventive for masturbation was careful supervision by parents. Pure-minded parents were advised especially to watch their during the vulnerable moments when a goes to the bathroom, sleeps, or bathes. “Watch his motions as the lies with covered head,” suggested one specialist, “listen to his breathing. Is it quick, hurried, gasping, sighing? There is danger lurking there.” Some boarding schools installed transoms above bathroom doors to enable the schoolmaster to keep an eye on suspected abusers. Cures for the masturbator were more complicated. Sleeping in straitjackets or tying the practicer’s hands either to the bedpost or to rings on the wall were usually effective. Special beds were designed which prevented a sleeper from turning over. A few ingenious Americans took out patents on the “genital cage,” a metal truss that held the penis and scrotum with springs. To complement the effectiveness of the cage, it was recommended that people wear clothes which opened only from behind. But ingenuity did not stop there. One cage, patented in 1900 by a Mr. Joseph Lees of Pennsylvania, featured an electrical alarm that was triggered in the unfortunate event of an erection. What today would be considered barbaric cures for the self-polluter were recommended and practiced by Victorians. According to some doctors, leeches placed around the sexual parts helped remove “congestion.” Bloodletting also quelled a masturbator’s appetite for sin. Other cures were more extreme. Some specialists prevented masturbation by perforating the foreskin of an uncircumcised penis and inserting a ring through it. Drugs were applied to the sexual parts to make a would-be abuser too sore to masturbate. After a strong dose of red iron or Spanish fly was applied to the genitals, masturbation was no longer a great temptation. But some doctors resorted to even more radical measures. Hypothesizing that one-half of the females who masturbated did so because of an irritation of the clitoris, one Chicago doctor recommended clitoral circumcision as a sure cure for female self-abuse. An Ohio doctor told in 1896 of the success he had experienced with an operation on habitual male abusers in which he removed from half an inch to an inch of the dorsal nerves in the penis. The operation rendered patients sexually impotent for approximately a year and a half, enough time to permit, in the doctor’s words, the “restoration of the physical and mental health.” Occasionally, nineteenth-century specialists prescribed marriage as the cure for male and female masturbation. Individual self-abuse, it seems, was practically eliminated by this surest of all Victorian remedies. SOURCE: John S. Haller Jr., and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 223. |
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