Page:A Treatise on the Diseases produced by Onanism, Masturbation, Self-pollution, and other excesses.djvu/19

 Rh preceding states, and particularly to the first: they rest. These are the three aspects under which we shall examine these organs. To render our remarks more intelligible, we will give a few definitions. The power of bringing the genital organs into a state of action is the venereal power: this when put in action is the act of venery. If this act results from the concurrence of the two sexes, it is coition. If it be caused by solitary manipulation, it then receives divers names; the terms most used are masturbation, or onanism. The act of venery, whether it does or does not result from the concurrence of the two sexes may or may not be injurious. When it is injurious in any degree there is then venereal excess, abuse of the genital organs. This sense is the only one attached in this book, to this mode of expression: for if in a moral and religious point of view the simple fact of coition in some cases and of onanism in every case be a vice, an excess, an abuse, the physician should apply these terms only to cases where the health is injured.

It might be thought that when these organs are at rest, when they are neither used nor abused, when the venereal sense is as it were asleep in them, and they seem occupied only with their own development, and nutrition, it might seem I say that these organs take little or no part in what is going on around them: but this is a mistake. We shall see that this dull life which then occupies them is sufficient to make them a powerful focus of action; that all the other organs owe to them a part of their mode of existence their form and substance. By this we can judge of what the genital system is capable, when excited, and when by the hand or otherwise it is brought to the highest degree of activity.

Consider him who was born an eunuch, the man who has never had genital organs, whose body, mind, and heart are developed without their influence: