ealthy individual, can produce any evil
results beyond slight functional disturbances, and these only when it is
practiced in excess. To illustrate the real pathological relationships of
masturbation, a few typical and important disorders may be briefly
considered.

The delicate mechanism of the eye is one of the first portions of the
nervous apparatus to be disturbed by any undue strain on the system; it is
not surprising that masturbation should be widely incriminated as a cause
of eye troubles. If, however, we inquire into the results obtained by the
most cautious and experienced ophthalmological observers, it grows evident
that masturbation, as a cause of disease of the eye, becomes merged into
wider causes. In Germany, Hermann Cohn, the distinguished ophthalmic
surgeon of Breslau, has dealt fully with the question.[318] Cohn, who
believes that all young men and women masturbate to some extent, finds
that masturbation must be excessive for eye trouble to become apparent. In
most of his cases there was masturbation several times daily during from
five to seven years, in many during ten years, and in one during
twenty-three years. In such cases we are obviously dealing with abnormal
persons, and no one will dispute the possibility of harmful results; in
some of the cases, when masturbation was stopped, the eye trouble
improved. Even in these cases, however, the troubles were but slight, the
chief being, apparently, photopsia (a subjective sensation of light) with
otherwise normal conditions of pupil, vision, color-sense, and retina. In
some cases there was photophobia, and he has also found paralysis of
accommodation and conjunctivitis. At a later date Salmo Cohn, in his
comprehensive monograph on the relationship between the eye and the sexual
organs in women, brought together numerous cases of eye troubles in young
women associated with masturbation, but in most of these cases
masturbation had been practiced with great frequency for a long period and
the ocular affections were usually not serious.[319] In England, Power has
investigated the relations of the sexual system to eye disease. He is
inclined to think that the effects of masturbation have been exaggerated,
but he believes that it may produce such for the most part trivial
complaints as photopsisae, muscsae, muscular asthenopia, possibly
blepharospasm, and perhaps conjunctivitis. He goes on, however, to point
out that more serious complaints of the eye are ca