Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/100

Rh were not, and suffered him to eat, drink, smoke, and libertinize to excess, until at last his constitution, enfeebled by amatory outrage in his early life, refused to respond to desire; his embolism increased; fistula attacked the perinæum, involving the entire pelvic system, necessitating castration at the knife of the surgeon, and ending at Chiselhurst, in fever and death, but a few months after,—and the crisis hastened swiftly by the keen anguish resulting from the consciousness that he, the great emperor, was no longer a man, but only a eunuch or human stag. This fact of his loss occasioned the "Decheance" act of the French Senate;—for they would not be ruled by either a woman—or a castrato.

Barrenness of woman results from similar causes; and so also does the four kinds of male impotence, now abounding even-where to a frightful extent. These are, 1st. Lack of muscular force; 2d. Inability to elaborate the vital fluid; 3d. Inability to retain it at all; or to retain it if, and when, elaborated; 4th. Inability to vitalize it by reason of trouble in the prostate gland. Hitherto the medical people have recognized but one form of impotence, whereas there are no less than four, each, of course, requiring quite dissimilar methods of curative treatment.

LIII. Nothing goes on either in soul or body without some sort of expenditure. We have a mental, moral, and affectional digestion as well as a physical one; and we all know that unless we excrete the superfluous matter of the food and drinks we take, dyspepsia comes in, and finally we grow dull, sleepy, and stupid from the accumulated phosphates, acid or alkaline, lime, carbon, etc., urea, uric acid, etc., and death soon comes tapping at the door; but who ever suspected that it is just as necessary to void mental, moral, and affectional wastes, and thus prevent soul-dyspepsia, or cure it if established? Yet such is the case. The mind that would be healthy must cast out of it all it cannot appropriate, assimilate, and transmute, else mental, moral, and affectional diseases set in, and psychal debility is the result, terminating in a complete deadening of all these higher qualities which par excellence make us truly human.

LIV. Now he or she who dwells mainly in the brain is subject to enormous nervous waste: and the blood, charged with refuse brain