Content area
Full text
MASTURBATION AS "A HEINOUS SIN"
By the time Dr Robertson dismissed "masturbational insanity" as a "popular superstition" (see box), belief in masturbation as a cause of mental illness had flourished as a medical superstition for fully a century. To be sure, sexual self-service had been regarded as immoral for a much longer period, because it was an "unnatural" practice. For that same reason, the act had on occasion been supposed to be unphysiologic as well; so perverse an assault on nature must necessarily injure the body designed by nature. Thus, an early 18th-century treatise on The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution advised young male readers that if they persisted in their evil indulgence, they would arrive at manhood unmanned, either impotent or subject to ejaculatio praecox and, in either case, rendered "ridiculous to women." 1 (pp45-46)
THE CONNECTION WITH INSANITY
A connection of the heinous sin with insanity began to be forged in the later 1700s, as Enlightenment era values fostered an understanding of mental imbalance as illness that might be cured. The construction of asylums to treat the mentally ill brought physicians into closer and more frequent contact with patients who masturbated often and openly. Because sexual arousal involved stimulation of the nervous system, it was easy to conclude that chronic nervous excitation attending the unnatural act of masturbation might eventually undermine the health of the brain. By the early 1800s, European and American physicians concurred that masturbation led to insanity. 2
During the 1830s, the notion was extended into the realm of popular belief by America's first lay health reformer, Sylvester Graham (1794-1851). Remembered today only as the inventor of a whole wheat cracker that constituted the modern era's first health food, Graham was a Presbyterian minister who preached a system of health behavior derived not from scientific observation, but from a moral logic based on 2 unquestioned premises: first was the puritanical conviction that all pleasurable sensation was satanic temptation in disguise, and second was the certainty that any behavior that was immoral had to be unhealthful as well. An efficient God wouldn't have ordered things any other way. In practical translation, any activity appearing to be stimulating, to emotions as well as physical organs, was potentially pathologic. 3
To date, the...