ions frequently occur before actual orgasm, and there is
not usually any insertion of the finger into the vagina in women
who have never experienced coitus, or, indeed, even in those who
have.

We must now turn to that aspect of our subject which in the past has
always seemed the only aspect of auto-erotic phenomena meriting attention:
the symptoms and results of chronic masturbation. It appears to have been
an Englishman who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, first
called popular attention to the supposed evils of masturbation. His book
was published in London, and entitled: _Onania, or the Heinous Sin of
Self-pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences in both Sexes,
Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice_, etc. It is not a serious
medical treatise, but an early and certainly superior example of a kind of
literature which we have since become familiar with through the daily
newspapers. A large part of the book, which is cleverly written, is
devoted in the later editions to the letters of nervous and
hypochondriacal young men and women, who are too shy to visit the author,
but request him to send a bottle of his "Strengthening Tincture," and
mention that they are inclosing half a guinea, a guinea, or still larger
sum. Concerning the composition of the "Strengthening Tincture" we are not
informed.[316] This work, which was subsequently attributed to a writer
named Bekkers, is said to have passed through no less than eighty
editions, and it was translated into German. Tissot, a physician of
Lausanne, followed with his _Traite de l'Onanisme: Dissertation sur les
Maladies produites par la Masturbation_, first published in Latin (1760),
then in French (1764), and afterward in nearly all European languages. He
regarded masturbation as a crime, and as "an act of suicide." His book is
a production of amusing exaggeration and rhetoric, zealously setting forth
the prodigious evils of masturbation in a style which combines, as
Christian remarks, the strains of Rousseau with a vein of religious piety.
Tissot included only manual self-abuse under the term "onanism;" shortly
afterward, Voltaire, in his _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, took up the
subject, giving it a wider meaning and still further popularizing it.
Finally Lallemand, at a somewhat later period (1836), wrote a book which
was, indeed, more scientific in character, but which still sought to
represent masturbation as the source of all evils.